Following its local case studies in Malawi, Zambia, and Benin, the AFRICAN FUTURES project aimed to apply the insights it had gathered to continental-scale visions for Africa. In 2025, we convened a participatory visioning workshop in Kinigi, Rwanda, gathering leaders and change-makers from across the continent and across sectors.
Dominant narratives about Africa’s future have marginalized African values and African agency. This workshop aimed to counteract this dominance by co-producing visions of transformative, sustainable, and just futures that foreground the continent’s agency in its own future. Each vision (co-created using the Manoa Mash-Up method) explored 2 of the Nature Futures Framework’s value perspectives.
We also used the Branching Pathways method to co-create dynamic pathways connecting those visions to the present. This method enables the pathways to navigate complexity and turbulence by branching into multiple possibilities at moments of uncertainty.
Selected participants also contributed speculative fiction stories to “Africa Phambili,” a fiction anthology compiled by the AFRICAN FUTURES project. The stories “Agapantha,” “Sankofa,” and “Black Yam” are rooted in this process.
The process created new networks among participants, and the scenarios highlight problem framings and strategic approaches that may contribute to transformative efforts. This study is also an early application of the Nature Futures Framework for scenario generation at the continental scale, and may be useful as a methodological example for future large-scale use of the framework.
The scenarios were made in: 2025
The scenarios look out to: 2125
