© All Africa Futures Forum

The Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, in collaboration with UNESCO and the WITS School of Governance (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), will host the All Africa Futures Forum on the theme “Transforming Africa’s Futures”. The aim of the three-day forum is to bring together African futures thinkers, and practitioners to explore how the “discipline of anticipation” has been shaped and applied in Africa and how it can be deliberately leveraged towards transforming Africa’s future onto more positive trajectories.

The main question to be debated will be: “What are the innovative foresight concepts, tools and planning methods that are necessary to transform Africa’s future?”

The objectives of the Forum will be as follows:

* Explore innovative foresight concepts, tools and planning methods that are transforming Africa’s future;
* Strengthen the anticipatory capabilities of African policy makers practitioners and planners;
* Allow the private, public and civil society sector to input, debate and interrogate the thinking, application and potentials for partnerships;
* Enable the establishment of an African Network of Foresight Practitioners.

The “Imagining Africa’s Futures” foresight project seeks to support the strategic priority adopted by UNESCO to address the needs and aspirations of African societies, in line with the vision formulated by the African Union of “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena.” Through its activities as a laboratory of ideas, a platform of international cooperation and a capacity-builder, UNESCO is trying to encourage the use of recent advances in methods for thinking about the future.

The objective of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project is to promote futures thinking in South Africa across all sectors with foresight practitioners, futurists, strategists and planners in public, private sectors, civil society and academia. The Node serves a broader African foresight network agenda through the virtual platform “Foresight for Development” and has recently extended into new partnerships in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.