Here’s a draft matrix produced for an Africa in 2030 project for Save the Children (a pro bono project). So we now need to pick a few brains. First, if anyone out there is interested in Africa we’d love to pick your brain. Second, if you are a scenario planner, especially someone based in Africa or someone that’s been involved in scenarios in the region we’d also love to hear from you.

Here’s the list of possible drivers from the workshops:

Democracy versus autocracy
Quality of education
Internal versus outward mindset (fragmented or not?)
Tribalism
Social equality
Male/female balance
Economic growth
Population (is this uncertain?)
Food
Electricity
Water
Migration/population movement
External influence (source?)
Influence of China
Employment
Infrastructure
Phone/internet penetration
Governance (see democracy v autocracy)
Inward flow of investment
Security (physical)
Debt
Intervention (development v humanitarian)
Climate Change
HIV/AIDS
Urbanization
Strength of Africa Union
Malaria
Aid flows

Our first matrix (not shown) set autocratic and democratic against an inward versus outward mindset (engagement with rest of the world high versus low) but my feeling was (still is) that one flows from the other.

The second matrix (also not shown) featured climate change (worse than expect versus better than expected) against the same democracy/autocracy axis.

Any thoughts? Personally I think the wording of Natural Resource Management is wrong or is at the very least ambiguous. Perhaps a better phrase would be something like stewardship of natural resources (selfishly squandered v equitably managed – or perhaps ordered v turbulent?).

Then again perhaps we should just name the axis Resources & the Natural Environment and have an axis based around stability v chaos?).

Views please!

A few months ago I did a talk and developed some rough scenarios for the future of fund-raising for a leadership team at Save the Children. Towards the end of the session, the subject of Africa came up and I had to admit that my knowledge and thinking in this area was rather poor. As a result, I was invited back to run a small scenarios workshop with members of the senior leadership team recently, all of whom had deep experience of either living in or working in Africa. The result was some outline scenarios for what the continent might look like in the year 2030.

I am writing up the output from the workshop over the next few weeks and once done this will be discussed by members of the team. Once we have agreement on the scenario matrix I will put some narrative around each and start thinking about the internal scenario logic.

This is a pro-bono project, so if anyone would like to contribute some Africa (or scenario) expertise please get in touch by posting a comment here. Once they are done the scenarios will be public domain and will be published  – certainly here.