Fabrice Niyonkuru is an interdisciplinary researcher with a diverse and international academic background, supported by competitive scholarship awards. Prior to joining the International Doctoral Programme Business and Human Rights – Governance in a Complex World at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg (FAU), he undertook a B.A. in Public Relations at Université Catholique de Kabgayi in Rwanda under the DAFI Scholarship, an M.A. in Procurement and Supply Chain Management at Moshi Co-operative University in Tanzania under the EAC–KfW Scholarship, and an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany under the DAAD Leadership for Africa Scholarship.

His doctoral research project, Informality and Structural Exclusion in Cocoa and Cobalt Supply Chains: Redesigning Governance, examines how transnational corporations engage with informal upstream actors through existing governance mechanisms (legal frameworks, CSR initiatives, and certification schemes) and how this engagement determines accountability, protection, and labour and environmental conditions at the upstream level.

While informal upstream actors (smallholder farmers, artisanal miners, labour brokers, middlemen, and informal cooperatives) are essential to production and sustain the cocoa and cobalt value chains, their roles and contributions are often not formally recognised or accounted for within prevailing governance arrangements. As a result, transparency is limited, accountability is weakened, and key human rights and environmental risks remain insufficiently addressed.

To address this problem, the research maps the roles, positions, and economic contributions of informal upstream actors within the value chain, analyses how corporations benefit from their structural invisibility, and proposes governance models that advance full-chain responsibility, inclusion, and justice.

It adopts a comparative and multi-scalar approach, contrasting cocoa supply chains in relatively stable contexts such as Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire—dominated by Western corporations operating within liberal accountability regimes—with cobalt supply chains in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where production takes place in fragile contexts and is dominated by Chinese corporations operating under state-led governance structures. Through this comparative lens, the project aims to identify broader patterns of exclusion and to inform workable policy recommendations that extend beyond cocoa and cobalt value chains.

Fabrice is based at the Chair of Corporate Sustainability Management under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Markus Beckmann.