An architect by training, Mayowa Abolaji came to YSE to think bigger than buildings. He leaves YSE with a vision for what climate-equitable design can look like across the rapidly urbanizing Global South.
What does sustainability look like with no access to the power grid and a limited budget? It’s the kind of question that can stay theoretical for a long time. For Three Cairns Scholar Mayowa Abolaji ’26 MEM, it became the question that shaped his two years at Yale, and last summer he went to Nigeria to answer it.
Abolaji transformed an aging primary school classroom in Ogun State into a fully off-grid learning space powered by solar energy and built with reclaimed materials. He had first discovered the school two years before coming to Yale and had been searching for a way to address it ever since.
Abolaji came to the MEM program as an architect by training, already focused on decarbonization and sustainable urban systems. Yet, the scale of the problem he wanted to tackle extended well beyond any single building. By 2050, nearly half the world’s population will live in cities, and much of that growth is happening in the Global South — in countries such as Nigeria, where rapid urbanization is outpacing the infrastructure that supports it.
“YSE gave me the space to start thinking in systems,” he said. “About how policies, government, human behavior, and the built environment all connect, rather than treating each as an isolated problem.”
Systems thinking was still largely theoretical when Abolaji arrived at YSE. The primary school in Ogun State, which he had first discovered three years earlier, was where he put what he had been learning into practice, and quickly realized how different things on the ground can be. While working through the planning process, he made a call to focus on a single classroom pilot rather than a larger intervention, a decision that proved central to the project's success.
Maya Sanyal, associate director at YSE’s Career and Professional Development Office, worked closely with Abolaji during the project’s planning. She was struck by his willingness to recalibrate when the original scope proved too ambitious.
“Once he realized it was more practical to focus on a pilot program rather than his dream goal, he immediately set the next steps in motion,” Sanyal said. “Mayowa’s ability to be goal-oriented makes him particularly capable of efficiently seeing complex projects to fruition.”
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Abolaji secured funding and set out to renovate a single classroom at a government school with no electricity, no proper seating, and no windows.
He sourced waste wood from a nearby sawmill and used it for the ceiling. He repurposed the school’s old desks and windows as flooring. He installed a solar panel array with a battery system and an inverter, providing the classroom with 24-hour electricity for the first time. The reaction from students was immediate. They wanted to understand how the batteries stored energy from the sun, and many students went home and asked their parents to buy small solar panels for themselves. He still receives texts from the school with updates.
“It shows you how much people can connect to sustainability,” Abolaji said.
Back at YSE, Abolaji brought that same grounded sensibility to Kroon Hall, where he served as one of the building’s sustainability coordinators. Working alongside faculty and staff, he gained hands-on insight into how high-performance buildings actually function.
As he finishes his MEM, Abolaji describes himself as standing at a crossroads. On one side is the pull of community-scale work, such as the Ogun State project. On the other, is the desire to continue using his expertise in building decarbonization and sustainable urban systems, to work at a scale where policy and implementation intersect. While he isn’t sure which goal he will pursue first, the primary school in Ogun state proved he knows how to build something lasting from limited materials.
Thomas Harris spent his early career working for a timber company, then built a dissertation around what a similar company was doing to a forest in Brazil. He landed a professorship before he finished writing it up.
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