Team

Ms. Wala Budri 

Founder & President 

Wala Budri is a real estate and urban development strategist with 15+ years of experience working at the intersection of business strategy, PropTech, the private sector, housing, and infrastructure development across Africa. She is the founder of ARADDI, Sudan’s first PropTech and real estate firm, which she built from the ground up into a profitable, multi-vertical business — spanning consulting, brokerage, and property management.

Her work is grounded from real life experience in entrepreurship and the conviction that Africa’s real estate and housing markets are not underdeveloped for lack of ideas or ambition, but for lack of capital and innovative policies built for their actual risk profile. Her advisory work focuses on real estate market analytics, housing policy, public-private partnerships, and the design of innovative strategies to develop tech-enabled real estate solutions.

Wala holds a Master of Arts in International Affairs from Columbia University, with a specialization in Urban Policy and Advanced Management, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Development from UCLA. She is fluent in Arabic and English and has worked across Sudan, Liberia, the United States, and the wider East African region.

Dr. Hamid El Bashir 

Senior Partner 

Dr. Hamid El-Bashir Ibrahim brings over three decades of leadership across academia, applied research, and international development to ARADDI Advisory. He provides strategic and governance leadership, drawing on his deep experience in post-conflict development, government partnership-building, and institutional leadership across fragile and transitional states.

Dr. Hamid served Country Representative for UNICEF in Eritrea, Zambia, and Sierra Leone, and as Deputy Country Representative in Romania, Chief of Field Office in Madhya Pradesh, India, and Senior Advisor to UNICEF’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa — where he shaped the organization’s strategic partnerships with the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and IGAD. His field experience spans ten countries, including several affected by conflict and civil war, from Sudan and South Sudan to the Caucasus and West Africa.

He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Connecticut, alongside postgraduate diplomas in Human Rights (Institute of Social Studies, The Hague), Demography and Population Studies (Cairo Demographic Center), and Regional Development and Planning (University of Khartoum). He is a published author on conflict, land tenure, pastoralism, and social change in Sudan and the wider Sahel region.

Mr. Joaquin Aviles Lopez

Partner

Joaquin brings over 20 years of infrastructure planning, project management, and international development experience to ARADDI Advisory, with a specific focus on the energy and infrastructure systems that make housing and urban development viable in underserved markets.

He served as Director of Operations for the Millennium Villages Project, a global partnership between Millennium Promise, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the United Nations, where he managed a multi-sector, $50-million-plus annual budget across ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Under his leadership, the project implemented a portfolio of more than 250 infrastructure projects spanning transportation, water, energy, and ICT.

Joaquin holds a Master’s in International Relations from the New School and a Master’s in Civil Engineering from the Universidad de Granada, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Sustainable Engineering Lab at Columbia University.