Re-connecting Futures: Indigenous Knowledge and Africa’s Digital Generation (EN)

FD1: Re-connecting Futures: Indigenous Knowledge and Africa’s Digital Generation (African Union in collaboration with ITC-ILO) (EN) Schedule: 9:00 – 16:30 Event Leaders: Tom Wambeke, International Training Centre of the International Labour Organisation, Italy Chigozie Emmanuel Okonkwo, African Union Commission, Ethiopia Description: Across the African continent, indigenous knowledge systems have shaped community life, ecological stewardship, conflict resolution, identity formation, learning, and creativity for generations. These systems—rooted in storytelling, relationality, apprenticeship, ecological intelligence, and communal governance—represent deep reservoirs of knowledge, resilience, and innovation. Yet in many places they risk marginalisation as technological and economic models imported from outside the continent become dominant. At the same time, Africa is home to the world’s youngest population. Today’s African youth grow up digitally connected, entrepreneurial, culturally hybrid, and immersed in global flows of media and technology. AI, mobile ecosystems, data cultures, and immersive learning tools will profoundly shape their futures. However, the global digital environment is largely structured by Western companies, infrastructures, and epistemologies. This means African youth often inherit technologies—and the political, social, and economic architectures surrounding them—that were not designed with African worldviews in mind. This foresight lab aims to shift that dynamic. Instead of asking how African youth can adapt to global digital trends, we ask: what becomes possible when technology evolves from African ways of knowing? What kinds of learning systems, youth livelihoods, value creation models, and governance forms emerge when futures are authored from within the continent? By blending indigenous epistemologies with new digital tools, we can begin imagining futures that are distinctly African—not derivatives of global narratives, but new pathways shaped by culture, community, and ancestral knowledge. By means of a design-driven approach, we stimulate imagination and encourage dialogue about the future. Knowledge and creative speculation nourish fruitful interaction. In this way, we guide both public and private organisations in exploring and envisioning their opportunities and challenges in the long term. We support them in conceptualising innovative products, services, and experiences, forming refreshing visions, and mobilising people towards (the day after) tomorrow. Agenda: 9:00 - 10:00 | Step 1 — Grounding in Story, Space, and Epistemologies 10:00 - 11:15 | Step 2 — Reframing Challenges through African Epistemologies 11:15 - 11:30 | Coffee Break 11:30 - 12:30 | Step 3 — Fusion Sparks: Critical What-If Provocations  12:30 - 13:30 | Step 4 — Worldbuilding Sprints  Groups expand one prompt into a full future world. 13:30 - 14:30 | Lunch 14:30 - 15:30 | Step 5 — Design Fiction Prototyping  Groups create experiential artefacts 15:30 - 15:45 | Coffee Break 15:45 - 16:30 | Step 6 — Implications for policy, pedagogy, and youth ecosystems (Gallery Walk/Video screening) Target Audience(s): Youth leaders, digital creators, community innovators Indigenous knowledge experts and cultural custodians Digital learning specialists and technologists Anthropologists, ethnographers, and researchers Education, labour, and innovation policymakers Artists, designers, and speculative practitioners Civil society organisations and development agencies Target Sector(s): Interdisciplinary Expected Outcomes: Positions indigenous knowledge as a strategic foundation for innovation. Creates space for African-authored futures in a Western-shaped technological landscape. Places African youth at the centre of future-making. Provides continuity through on-ramp and off-ramp engagements. Uses worldbuilding and AI-supported design fiction to create tangible future artefacts. Bridges community knowledge, technological imagination, and youth-driven creativity. Fee: 0 EUR Click here to register for the workshop and the conference