Episode 06: Kasmet Niyongabo

“I can think of very few things in life that are more exhilarating than giving someone an opportunity to excel.”

We tend to think of gift planning as a decision we make later in life, but there’s no law that says you have to wait. Kasmet Niyongabo, Sc’11, MBA’20, tells us about the planned gift he made shortly after his undergrad, and the unlikely influence his parents had on his decision.

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Cause & Effect, Episode 6, Kasmet Niyongabo, Sc’11, MBA’20

Host:  It’s no secret that our parents’ experiences shape who we become. Sigmund Freud figured that out more than 100 years ago. 

Usually, people interpret this to mean that the lessons your parents taught you helped mould your character. You know, if they set high expectations for you, for example, you were likely to do better in school. Or if they made you do chores around the house, you would grow up to take more initiative at work. That kind of thing.

But, you know, it works in subtler ways too. We watch our parents and see how they lived their lives, and that informs and influences the decisions we go on to make. All of the decisions we go on to make – including philanthropy.

I’m Deborah Melman-Clement, and this is Cause and Effect, a Queen’s Alumni Review podcast, where we dive into the motivations of philanthropists and explore what they’re passionate about and the impact they have on the world. 

Kasmet Niyongabo’s decision to become a philanthropist was absolutely shaped by his parents’ experiences – but not in the way you might think. And his decision to make higher education his personal cause was also shaped by his parents’ experiences – but also not in the way you might think.

You see, Kasmet’s family is from Burundi, a tiny African country just right in there between Tanzania and the Congo. His parents believed that education was important, and they both went to university in Europe – which is where they met. His mother was studying to be a veterinarian in Bulgaria, when she ran into some financial trouble.

Kasmet:  My mom had to move universities and come to a university in Sofia, where they were just $300 shy of being able to make tuition, because she had transferred from veterinary sciences to essentially like med school. And they were just too broke, and she essentially couldn’t graduate, and so she came back to Burundi and had me there.

Host: Three hundred dollars. That was all that stood between Kasmet’s mother and her dream of becoming a veterinarian and staying in Europe.  Going back to Burundi was not at all what Kasmet’s parents wanted to do. After all, Burundi wasn’t exactly a safe place to raise a young family.

Kasmet: There was a genocide in Burundi in 1972 where my grandparents on my dad’s side, my granddad, was assassinated. And so, it was very traumatic for that whole generation and a lot of them wanted to make a big kind of change. And so, Dad was very politically motivated to make those changes.

Host: The son of an assassinated leader, Kasmet’s father was an ambitious young man, and also a bit of a visionary. He decided that if he was going to have to live in Burundi again, he was going to make things better – by starting his own political party.

Kasmet:  And so, when he came back to Burundi, there were a few complications. One was he found out that there was already someone who had a similar idea of creating a political party that was quite aligned and was quite far along that journey, so Dad essentially said, hey, I can probably just help him out. So he managed the campaign and Ndadaye won and became one of the first democratically elected presidents of Burundi.

Host: Melchior Ndadaye, the newly elected president, ushered in a new era of hope for Burundians. But it didn’t go well for him – or anyone else, for that matter.

Kasmet Ndadaye was assassinated just a few months into his presidency, but since Dad had managed his campaign, he was sent to Paris as his ambassador.

Host: Kasmet moved to Paris with his father and stepmom, returning to Burundi shortly after the assassination.

Kasmet: It was a very hard time in Burundi in 1993. There was a big civil war. I remember one time I actually had to sleep at the school because, as Dad was trying to pick me up, he could clearly see someone with a grenade that was just waiting for the door to open to throw it in the car. 

Host: His father’s diplomatic status kept the family safe, and eventually he got a new posting – as Burundi’s ambassador to Canada. Kasmet was 12 when the family moved to Ottawa, and he stayed there until the end of high school.

As Freud was so quick to point out, our parents’ experiences shape our decisions, so it’s not all that surprising that Kasmet knew that his next step after high school would be university. The bigger decision he faced was which university. He chose Queen’s because he remembered it from a middle school field trip. 

Kasmet:  It was one of the only universities that didn’t offer me an actual bursary. But I thought hey, it’s got an amazing reputation, the city is amazing, I should just try it out.

Host:  Once he committed to coming to Queen’s, Kasmet had to figure out how to pay for it.

Kasmet:  Being from Burundi, my family never really thought that I’d be going to school in Canada, so we didn’t have the kind of savings that I have for my kids. They’re going to be fine when they go through, but I just didn’t have that luxury.

Host: With the help of a few bursaries – many of them set up by generous alumni donors -- Kasmet came to Queen’s to study biochemistry. He remembers his undergraduate experience fondly. He made close friends, ran for office, and learned a lot about himself – including the fact that apparently he had chosen the wrong major.

Kasmet: I kind of realized that I didn’t love biochemistry. And I spoke to my art teacher because I was feeling a little bit lost, my high school art teacher, and I was like, here’s the situation, I really want to make a bit of a shift. And he was like, have you thought about engineering? And I was like, oh, not really, but that’s kind of cool. It’s like creative and you get to solve problems. So, I did the shift into engineering. And when I had to declare my major, I went to one of the engineering nights and saw this million-ton blast and I was like I’d love to get into that and also do something like that and also mechanical engineering. So, I did the mining-mech concentration.

Host: Kasmet has been in the mining business since he graduated. His career, 11 years old and counting, has included stops with five companies, developing technologies and processes for potash and uranium mines in Western Canada. A few years ago, he came back to Queen’s to earn an MBA at Smith School of Business, and today he is an associate with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

All you have to do is talk with Kasmet for a few minutes to see how passionate he is about mining and its impact on the world. He sees it as a viable solution to a lot of the most pressing problems, including the ones identified by the United Nations in their 17 Sustainable Development Goals. A lot of those problems are top-of-mind in Burundi, which the World Population Review placed at the very top of this year’s Poorest Countries in the World list. And when Kasmet puts the pieces of his puzzle together, he envisions using his mining knowledge to bring new prosperity to his home country.

Kasmet:   My dad still lives in Burundi. It’s a pretty tough place to live in. In the summer, not everyone gets power 24/7. So, you’ll get electricity and there’s only one hydroelectric dam in the whole country, so they just don’t have enough power to power every house. So with management consulting, one of the things I would love to do is to see what I can do to help with that kind of power crisis in Africa.

A 300-megawatt small-modular reactor would be this huge, amazing possibility to power a lot of what we have in Africa. Obviously it can’t be done right now because it’s too expensive. But it’s a really ambitious project. There are a lot of people working on that exact same kind of problem, but, you know, a person can dream. And I think that the ability to have a plan that potentially could just lift billions of people out of poverty is really neat.

Host: Considering that he’s the son of a man who was this close to starting his own political party, it’s not surprising that Kasmet has ambitious goals. And while he waits for the stars to align so he can pursue them, he’s found another way to make his mark on the world. Shortly after his undergrad, Kasmet decided to become a philanthropist.

Kasmet:   I really wanted to do something for the university and at that point I had just graduated from the Mining and Engineering School, and I thought it would be good to give back to the school and to allow for other people who had been in my situation to be afforded an education with a little bit less stress.

Host: So, he made a planned gift, a way of expressing his gratitude for the bursaries he received as a student and paying the favour forward. Kasmet’s gift combines his two causes –education and mining -- and helps encourage talented students to study mining engineering.

Of course, Kasmet was fresh out of undergrad when he came up with the whole idea, and he didn’t exactly have the resources to set up a bursary. So, he got creative.

Kasmet:   When I put myself through school, I was very grateful for every single bursary that I received, and I thought, hey, if I can do something like that, I think that would be pretty amazing. And especially when we’re a little bit younger and earlier in our career, I think it’s a little bit tougher to make a substantial change with a donation. But you can make a planned gift and that makes a potentially really big difference later on.

Host:  Usually when we think about wills and gift planning, we tend to think of it as decision we make later in life, so it’s a bit surprising that Kasmet and his wife, Jessica, were thinking so far ahead. After all, most people don’t make their first planned gifts until they’re in their 50s. It may have been an unusual decision, but for Kasmet, it was a sensible way to support the causes that are so important to him – sensible, but also invigorating. 

Kasmet: It’s one thing to say, yeah, I really want everyone to look into this but it’s another to say in a very small way I am enabling people that have more energy, more will to discover and push. You’re allowing them to get a chance to do that. I can think of very few things in life that are more exhilarating than giving someone an opportunity to excel.  

Host:  When Kasmet thinks back on the opportunities he’s been given to excel, it all comes back to his parents – the decisions they made, the circumstances they were thrown into, and the extraordinary events of their extraordinary lives that shaped his life and inspired his choices – including his philanthropy. 

Kasmet:   One of the really amazing things that happened for me was Dad having that chance to be an ambassador in Canada and the family moving out here, and one thread that kind of ties it all together, that $300 that my parents didn’t have that severely changed the course of their life. Whenever I can do any kind of difference to help someone else, whether I know them or not, that has a talent to do something successful, it’s quite fulfilling.

Host:  I want to wrap up by taking a moment to thank our executive producers, Karen Bertrand and Scott Anderson. I also want to thank my Advancement colleagues, Michelle Fuko, Sara Franca, Rachel Castellano, Natalie Shearer, Nicole Lynch, Alex Beshara, Callum Linden, Yeshi Dolma, Grace Morton, and Wendy Treverton. And, of course, I want to thank Kasmet Niyongabo for so generously sharing his truly amazing story with us.

If you have an amazing philanthropy story that want to share, we definitely want to hear from you. Reach out to your relationship manager if you have one, or look for me on the Advancement staff directory at Queen’sU-dot-ca. 

I’m Deborah Melman-Clement, and this was Cause and Effect. If you want more, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or Amazon.