This project focuses on empowering youth innovators and changemakers in East and Southern Africa (ESA) through strategic foresight and relational systems thinking. By engaging with small-scale innovations and developing skills to meet future challenges, the research aims to co-create praxis frameworks that promote systemic justice. The project seeks to explore how youth-led initiatives can foster economic well-being, ecological resilience and transformative social change. Through collaborative processes – such as foresight methodologies, reflection and network building – the project equips young people with anticipatory skills to shape sustainable and just futures, addressing the region’s complex challenges with innovative, context-relevant solutions.
Project Overview
The project explores youth seed initiatives and youth changemaker agency in ESA through strategic foresight and relational systems thinking to strengthen anticipatory skills for addressing future skills needs. By co-creating contextually relevant skills anticipation praxis frameworks, the research seeks to equip youth innovators with approaches to drive systemic justice, focusing on economic well-being, ecological resilience and long-term transformative change.
Project Rationale
The project is built on the need to explore and understand how youth-led social innovations can drive transformative changes within ESA. It emphasises the importance of studying change dynamics – the processes, challenges and enablers that influence transformative shifts in society. Since each social system is complex with unique power structures, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to advancing innovations. Instead, the project frames this challenge as an opportunity to investigate common trends such as how visions develop, how practical innovations emerge and how certain technologies and societal expectations can either hinder or promote new ideas.
Therefore, it seeks to:
- Understand how small-scale innovations can drive systemic change.
- Learn from existing youth initiatives to foster sustainable futures.
- Identify the conditions necessary to scale these innovations and activate transformative change.
- Promote systemic justice and youth futures by empowering youth innovators to shape desirable futures within ESA.
Project Objectives
- To co-create visions and systemic innovations that enable youth innovators and changemaker agency in ESA to develop bold and hopeful scenarios using the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes foresight methodology, fostering youth-led future-ready pathways to systemic justice.
- To co-explore how complexity-informed anticipation strategies can facilitate new modes of becoming systems innovators, enabling youth change agents to discover their roles and relational dynamics to engage with contextual challenges and develop fit-for-purpose anticipatory strategies. This exploration will focus on discovering collective and individual praxis heuristics frameworks that support the transition to challenge entrenched systems and nurture the emergence of systemic alternatives based on a five-fold ecology of becoming praxis utilising a novel complexity and anticipation-informed methodology during the Anticipation Summit.
- To refine the processual modes of becoming and ecologies of praxis strategies with youth systems innovators in ESA to shift their pathways toward systemic justice. Through the collective individuation process of reflection and learning during the Youth Futures Labs, the participants will revise their Anticipation Praxis Frameworks based on the five-fold ecology of becoming praxis. This framework will be reevaluated within the confines of co-explored relational heuristics.
- To co-create a contextually appropriate networked ecology of anticipatory youth systems innovation praxis that fosters transnational partnerships, inviting alternative ways of knowing and being. This process, through critical self-reflection, aims to advance economic well-being, ecological resilience and systemic justice in ESA, enabling youth systems innovators to co-create conditions for systemic justice.
Expected Outcomes
- Identified Systemic Innovations and Empowered Youth Innovators: A suite of identified systemic innovations that help youth innovators address the skills needs of African youth, aimed at strengthening their in-demand anticipatory skills through foresight methodologies. This outcome will offer youth innovators actionable strategies to support youth-led initiatives, fostering their capacity to anticipate and navigate future challenges effectively while driving positive systemic change in East and Southern Africa.
- Empowerment of Youth Innovators in Systemic Change: Enhanced understanding of the roles played by youth innovators in driving systemic change, leading to increased motivation and capacity to transition from the dominant system to emergent alternatives. This outcome will contribute to the cultivation of supportive innovation ecosystems that empower youth to challenge existing paradigms, foster systemic justice and facilitate the emergence of more sustainable and equitable systems in East and Southern Africa.
- Characterisation and Promotion of Processual Modes and Ecology of Praxis in Youth Innovators: Identification and documentation of the processual modes of becoming and the ecology of praxis that characterise youth innovators, highlighting their inherent drive towards systemic justice. This outcome will inform strategies to nurture and amplify these traits, empowering youth to catalyse positive systemic transformations aligned with principles of justice and sustainability in East and Southern Africa.
- Cultivation of Contextually Appropriate Anticipatory Praxis in Youth Innovators: Development of a networked ecology of provisional anticipation praxis tailored to youth innovators, aiming to germinate the seed initiatives into a networked ecology of systemic innovations promoting economic well-being, ecological resilience and systemic justice in East and Southern Africa. This outcome will provide actionable guidelines and frameworks to empower youth in shaping a sustainable and just future for the region.
- A Dynamic Microsite and Peer Learning Platform for Youth Innovators: A network for systemic change and community of systems practice are established. This platform and network enable youth innovators to refine their practice in change agency, informed by futures and complexity thinking. Improved availability and capacity to develop contextualised evidence-based knowledge and policy recommendations for African youth skills anticipation, foresight, governance and holistic skills development training are realised.
