Fennet Habte

Fennet Habte is a graduate student at Columbia SIPA, where she is specializing in urban policy and data analytics. She is interested in equitable urban development and cities’ resilience to conflict, crises, and disasters - particularly on the African continent. 

Fennet serves on the board of SIPA’s Pan-African Network and is a member of the 2025-26 cohort of Columbia’s International Fellows Program. She is a member of the working group Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference. 

She was a graduate intern at the New York City Office of Technology & Innovation and has previously worked at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigation Lab, the Gunda Werner Institute for Feminism and Gender Democracy, and the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. At GPPi, she researched and consulted for the German Federal Foreign Office on digital threats to African elections and feminist foreign policy in crisis prevention and peacebuilding.

She completed her BA in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and UC Berkeley.