Re-connecting Futures: Indigenous Knowledge and Africa’s Digital Generation (EN)
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 09:00 – 16:30
Schedule: 9:30 – 16:30
Room: Kumasi
Event Leader: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 artifacts
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
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 (with lunch included)
This workshop is fully booked
