The African Futures Dialogue Series was conceptualized after an event in Nairobi with Society for International Development (SID) in partnership with Next Generation Foresight Practitioners in Africa (NGFP) network in February 2024, kickstarted an impactful project aimed at interrogating and ideating what a Fairer Futures for Africa looks like and how it might be intergenerationally achieved.
The objective of the project is to engage both senior and emerging futurists, foresight practitioners, experts and thought leaders from across the continent, primarily drawn from the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners in Africa (NGFP) network, into participatory dialogues that would allow for collection of insights and perspectives on challenges and opportunities shaping Africa’s future, including signals, trends and drivers that could be used to connect, collaborate and collectively enact a more desirable future trajectory for Africans, and by Africans.
In 2023, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonia Guterres, spoke to the need for global cooperation to overcome current and future challenges through effective multilateralism to help accelerate global development goals. It is this concern that led to, and elaborated in, the publication of ‘Our Common Agenda’ Report published by the UN which provides recommendations to member states, whilst highlighting 12 commitments proposed by the Secretary General, to aid in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals, which as of 2024, are 5 years away from the target timeline.
Amongst the proposed commitments was the urge to embrace a ‘Quintet of Change’ which features innovation, digital data, strategic foresight and behavioural science and culture.
Through the partnership with NGFP, we envision a conversation that would intrinsically attempt to include African foresight practitioners in the direction of participatory engagements in dialogue, to produce a more organic and inclusive perspective on the future, and how commitments made at the global level can provide impact (both negative and positive) in the African context; and whether there are gaps we can leverage our insights and experience to purposefully steer the negotiations and deliberations towards fair idealistic futures for Africa by Africans.
It is from this thinking that the African Futures Dialogue Series was birthed, pegged initially to the ongoing deliberations at the Summit of the Future and negotiations towards a Pact for the Future. The effort to weave and engage an intergenerational African Futures Network1 once every month offers the platform to discuss, in context and foresight, what the chapters of the Pact entail and if therein it captures the current gaps and opportunities necessary to bring parity to the treatise from a global south perspective (with a focus on Africa).
Purpose & Objectives for the Dialogue Series
The purpose of the dialogue series is to allow our network of foresight practitioners from across the continent and in the diaspora to appraise the Pact for the Future and the various commitments expected to be agreed upon during the Summit of the Future. This also includes the Global Digital Compact (a framework that on digital cooperation to help realise a secure, open, and free digital future for all member states), the Declaration on Future Generations and the Reforms to the International Financial Architecture (which calls for reforms focused on global economic governance, debt relief and the cost of sovereign borrowing, international public finance).
These treatises are to be appraised by the network members through the lens of continental aspirations framed in such treatise as the Malabo Declaration, Agenda 2063, and the recent Addis Ababa Declaration from the African Union.
So why are we engaging virtually?
The network of Next Generation of Foresight Practitioners in Africa chose to leverage on technology and virtual conferencing as an enabler to participating in conversations critique, appraise and make recommendations to the deliberations the representative well-funded organisations, such as the Pan African Youth Union (PYU) and African Union Economic Social & Cultural Council, engage in.
The Africa Futures Dialogue Series thus engages and extends the conversation and reach of the agencies to discussion at the regional and member states level through our network of sense-makers to frame an idealistic future-proof improved perspective from such participatory engagements with the network of Next Generation Foresight Practitioners in Africa.
