Rwandan Northeastern graduate student Germain Mucyo builds community in Maine through tech, mentorship and immigrant advocacy.
Wherever Germain Mucyo goes, he seeks out community and looks for ways to support others.
In his hometown of Kigali, Rwanda, he helped develop an irrigation system for farmers as part of an electronics club project, addressing soil dehydration and improving food supply.
In college, he mentored fellow students through a Toastmasters club.
Today, the 28-year-old volunteers with Maine Initiatives, a nonprofit that supports social, economic and environmental justice through philanthropy.
“All those roles helped me to listen to people, and that’s where the zeal or the thirst for solving people’s problems comes from,” says Mucyo.
This drive to help others, he says, comes from his mother, who was always involved in community service and offering help to others, even when she had little to give.
Now a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, Mucyo is particularly interested in networks and cybersecurity. He says he especially appreciates the program’s hands-on nature.
“Every course has modules, and every module you have something to do, something to program,” he says. “Engineers are prepared to do projects as they come.”
Mucyo was born three years after the Rwandan civil war and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group, both of which shaped his childhood, sense of identity and worldview.
“My family lived through both,” Mucyo says. “We lost several close relatives, including grandparents, uncles and aunties. Each April, we gather to remember them.”
Growing up in post-genocide Rwanda, he says, meant being raised in a country where healing and rebuilding were national priorities. The aftermath affected everything from how people interacted and how communities were restructured to how children like Mucyo were taught to value peace, unity and resilience.
“I witnessed both the quiet pain and the determination of my parents and neighbors to create a better future from such devastating loss,” he says.
“There is a collective urgency to catch up with where we were held back, to reclaim lost time and opportunity. That push drives me to travel, to learn globally and to seek out knowledge and technologies that could help build a stronger Rwanda. I often find myself asking: What can I take from this experience that might benefit my country or community back home?”
Mucyo excelled at math in school and was captivated by systems and technology. That led him to study electronics and telecommunication engineering.
“I thought it was something that involves math, people and building solutions for people,” he says. “It’s something that brings people and technology, and systems [together] working for the interest of the community.”
While at the University of Rwanda, Mucyo was active in various student organizations. At Toastmasters, he says, he gained leadership skills, eventually becoming a mentor’s club leader and the vice president of education. In the Giant Electronics club, he and other young people built different solutions for real-world problems — like their irrigation system — gaining valuable hands-on experience.
After graduation, Mucyo worked as an IT lead at a media company. But he wanted to try as many things before the age of 30 as possible.
That motivation led him to enroll in a six-month road safety program at Hasselt University in Belgium.
After completing that program, Mucyo came to the United States and landed in Maine.
“When I came to Maine, it was, of course, cold and snow,” he says. “But you get used to it.”
Now, he says, the Pine Tree State feels like home. However, it took him several months to make connections and find a new community.
“Immigrants end up discouraged when you don’t know anybody,” Mucyo says. “They end up doing low-paying jobs.”
Eventually, he connected with Amjambo Africa!, a newspaper that provides information for immigrants, shares stories of successful new Mainers and covers news from Africa. The paper is part of the Institute for Nonprofit News network of 500 nonprofit newsrooms.
“We write stories about immigrants, how they live, what they do, how they cope in the new environment,” Mucyo says.
Originally, he did freelance work for the newspaper. Now, Mucyo is a director of audience development and technology, working remotely from Boston.
Through the newspaper, Mucyo connected with the Maine Initiative, a private philanthropy network. Its Immigrant-Led Organizations Fund has awarded more than $2 million in grants to over 40 organizations led by and serving Maine’s immigrants.
This summer, Mucyo volunteered to be one of the application readers for the 2025 funding round, which will award $45,000 grants to 10 organizations over three years. So far, the applications he’s reviewed include after-school programs for children, job readiness training for youth, and adult education initiatives focused on wellness and trauma recovery.
Mucyo is also preparing to support participants of the Pathways to Software Engineering, a pilot program launched in May by the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition in partnership with Resilient Coders, a nonprofit workforce development program, and IntWork, a boutique recruiting agency.
The program supported by the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development offers free full-time coding education — an 18-week bootcamp — and biweekly stipends to historically marginalized youth, aiming to diversify Maine’s tech workforce.
When Mucyo goes back to Maine, he likes to stop by Northeastern’s Portland campus.
“That’s one of my favorite places to work remotely from,” he says. “One of the coolest things I’ve found about that place is that anyone who wants to sit and create has equipment to do that.”
He often chats with new people, making connections, often with other foreign students who are eager to learn how things work in the U.S. and find a sense of belonging, just as Mucyo once did.
“I understand their need for the community [which] I am still trying [to help build],” he says.