The Africa that plans ahead
Foresight that combines insight, imagination and action can help Africa move from reactive governance to shaping long-term futures.
For more than six decades, Africa has too often been portrayed through a narrow, rather passive developmental lens, depicting a continent constantly reacting to crises, shocks and volatility. Yet, the 2025 African Futures Conference made it clear that ‘Africa does not suffer from a lack of potential, nor from a lack of vision.’ The challenge lies in turning long-term aspirations into sustained action. It is precisely in the gap between reactive governance and anticipatory governance that Africa’s future will be won or lost.
At the Institute for Security Studies, the African Futures and Innovation (AFI) programme has long argued that the ability to look further ahead, imagine alternative futures and act on them is not a luxury; it is a strategic capability. This year’s conference reinforced this message: foresight is not an academic exercise; it is a form of political agency and part of Africa’s most undervalued potential.
Foresight is not an academic exercise; it is a form of political agency
Insight: seeing Africa as it truly is
The opening keynote by Dr Jakkie Cilliers reflected on why insight (the first pillar of the 2025 conference) is not optional for Africa’s long-term development prospects. His presentation, based on the AFI’s latest Africa 2043 Futures Report, set out the stakes. On the current trajectory, the continent’s overall economy will grow from US$2.6 trillion in 2023 to only US$6.4 trillion in 2043. However, under a high-growth “combined scenario”—in which governance reforms, industrialisation, trade integration and human capital investments align (i.e. an Africa that turns the AU Agenda 2063 into motion)—the continent could reach a US$8.9 trillion economy.
The same divergence is also evident in poverty pathways. Under business-as-usual, 441 million Africans could still be living in extreme poverty by 2043 (representing 19% of the total population; bearing in mind the Sustainable Development Goal is <3% by 2030). Under a proactive, well-governed, high-growth scenario, that number would fall to approximately 11%; the difference made by actioning policy.
Numbers, however, do not dictate destiny. They reveal opportunity, reality and risk.
Imagination: unshackling the futures we cannot yet see
If insight grounds thinking in reality, imagination frees it. The second keynote, delivered by Dr Steven Lichty and youth advocate Wanjiku Waibochi, shifted the discussion from charts to consciousness. Their work, rooted in trauma healing, community resilience and creative storytelling, revealed a truth often overlooked in technocratic and evidence-based spaces: that people cannot be expected to plan for a future they cannot imagine.
Across Kenya, their programs demonstrate what happens when imagination is restored. Young people, previously locked in day-to-day survival mode, begin to see long-term possibilities. They rebuild the agency. They re-enter education. They start businesses. They envision futures beyond trauma, poverty or violence, and crucially, they start to care not only about their own futures but about the futures of their wider communities and the next generation.
This is the missing link in many planning systems. It is assumed that technical models or policy documents are enough to transform behaviour. Yet without imagination, without the cognitive freedom to picture alternatives, the boldest scenarios remain abstractions.
Foresight is not just a tool. It is a form of healing, when it restores the capacity to plan beyond survival and crisis. And Africa’s long-term development depends on healing the psychological and structural constraints that limit collective imagination.
Action: turning foresight into governance
The third keynote, by Dr Olugbenga Adesida, moved from imagination to implementation. His message was deliberately uncomfortable in that Africa does not fail for lack of vision. It fails for lack of execution and action. He emphasised that many of the continent’s most forward-looking initiatives—from the Lagos Plan of Action to numerous national Vision documents—did not collapse because they were unrealistic, but because they were never embedded in governance systems.
As he put it, ‘foresight must move from an exercise to a habit of governance.’ That requires several key components. Long-term thinking must be embedded into budgets, accountability systems and public administration. Direct participation from political leaders, not only from technical teams, must be enhanced. Cross-sector collaboration between governments, civil society and business must be enabled. A cultural shift away from reactive crisis management toward anticipatory decision-making must be fostered.
For too long, African governments have been trapped between short electoral cycles and long-term development needs. Foresight breaks that cycle by offering a structured way to think beyond immediate pressures.
Yet, the most compelling part of Dr Adesida’s reflection was his call to courage. Foresight, he argued, is not about predicting the future; it is about liberating society from inherited assumptions about what is possible.
Africa’s most valuable resource
Discourse about Africa’s resources frequently defaults to the usual list: minerals, solar energy, youthful demographics and land. The 2025 Conference underscored a different truth: Africa’s most valuable resource is its ability to reimagine itself.
A continent that can see its long-term pathways clearly, design alternatives boldly and implement reforms decisively has no reason to be trapped in low-growth futures
A continent that can see its long-term pathways clearly, design alternatives boldly and implement reforms decisively has no reason to be trapped in low-growth futures. The challenge is not capability. It is coherence. There are pockets of excellence: strong modelling tools, active youth movements, vibrant innovation ecosystems and growing policy networks. What the continent lacks is alignment. This is where institutions that can connect evidence, lived experience and political choice become critical.
Foresight offers a shared language. It builds bridges between evidence and experience, between data and stories, between the state and its citizens. It asks to take development seriously enough to plan beyond crisis and to trust enough to imagine beyond constraint.
The Africa that transforms
If Africa is to harness potential into leverage—as the ISS’s Executive Director, Dr Fonteh Akum, highlighted—it must cultivate the discipline of long-term thinking. Not in the form of a report. Not in the form of a conference. But in governance culture.
If Africa is to harness potential into leverage, it must cultivate the discipline of long-term thinking
That means normalising foresight units within government structures. It means training civil servants to think in scenarios. It means supporting youth leaders, artists, technologists, researchers and local communities to participate in shaping futures. It means embedding evidence and creativity into national planning. And above all, it means refusing the narrative that Africa’s future is predetermined.
The Africa that aligns insight, imagination and action is the Africa that finally governs the future rather than being governed by it.
That is the Africa to which AFI is helping to give shape, one partnership, one futures conversation, one scenario and one reimagined possibility at a time.
Image: geralt/Pixabay
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