Questions worth exploring.

Africa's food systems sit at the heart of both its deepest vulnerabilities and its most promising regenerative possibilities. From smallholder farming to urban food deserts in the fastest-growing cities, the challenge is to build food systems that are ecologically sound, economically just, and culturally rich.

This area invites you to design transitions that go beyond yield optimisation or supply-chain efficiency to address the deeper questions of land rights, seed sovereignty, traditional ecological knowledge, and the role of food in cultural identity and community resilience, reimagining how Africa grows, distributes, governs, and relates to food.

Question to explore
How might food systems nourish people, sustain livelihoods and regenerate the places they depend on?

Relevant perspectives
Agroecological innovators, food sovereignty advocates, urban farmers, pastoralists, seed keepers, and agri-tech entrepreneurs

One possible inquiry
A locally grounded inquiry into school meals, producer income and the relationships that connect them.

Africa’s growing cities and settlements will shape lives, livelihoods and ecological relationships for generations. Yet dominant models of planning and development continue to displace informal communities, erase local spatial intelligence, and reproduce the extractive geographies of the colonial city.

This area invites you to imagine and prototype urban futures that are inclusive, ecologically resilient, and culturally grounded, futures in which the city is a commons, not a commodity, and in which housing, settlements, and infrastructure evolve toward spatial justice.

Question to explore
How might we shape places where people can belong, move, work and live well?

Relevant perspectives
Spatial designers, planners, informal settlement communities, local governments, transport actors, and housing innovators

One possible inquiry
How could a neighbourhood adapt its shared spaces to support care, enterprise and changing climate conditions?

Africa bears a disproportionate burden of climate impacts while contributing least to historical emissions, a profound injustice that demands not only adaptation but transformative action. At the same time, the continent's vast renewable energy potential offers an extraordinary opportunity to leapfrog fossil fuel dependency and build distributed, community-owned energy systems.

This area invites you to design pathways at the intersection of climate adaptation, ecological restoration, and African-led energy transitions, moving beyond the narrow framing of 'climate resilience' toward communities that are not merely surviving climate change but building regenerative ecologies and economies able to thrive within planetary boundaries.

Question to explore
How might climate adaptation and energy transitions expand everyday possibilities while restoring living systems?

Relevant perspectives
Climate scientists, renewable energy innovators, restoration practitioners, community resilience organisations, and policy advocates

One possible inquiry
What different futures could community energy ownership make possible for a particular place?

African health systems face intersecting pressures: underfunded public infrastructure, the persistent burden of infectious disease, rising non-communicable disease, and deep inequalities in access to care. Yet the continent also holds extraordinary assets in community health knowledge, traditional medicine, and the social fabric of care that formal systems often fail to mobilise.

This area invites you to imagine health and wellbeing futures that integrate formal and informal systems, centre community knowledge and indigenous knowledge, shift the balance toward prevention, and address the social, ecological, and economic determinants of health.

Question to explore
How might systems of care enable people to be well, receive support and live with dignity?

Relevant perspectives
Public health practitioners, traditional healers, community health workers, health technology innovators, and mental health advocates

One possible inquiry
How could community care connect formal services, local knowledge and the needs of people providing care?

Africa's creative industries, music, film, fashion, design, literature, visual art, gaming, and digital culture, are among the most dynamic and globally influential on the planet. Yet African creators continue to operate in economic systems that extract value from their work while offering limited return, with ownership, distribution, and archives frequently held elsewhere.

This area invites you to design the infrastructure, platforms, policies, and narratives for futures in which African culture is a fully sovereign creative and economic force: economies where creators own their intellectual property, earn equitably, and are recognised as central contributors to the continent's development.

Question to explore
How might creative practice generate cultural value, meaningful livelihoods and more equitable ownership?

Relevant perspectives
Artists, musicians, creative-industry entrepreneurs, intellectual property advocates, and digital platform innovators

One possible inquiry
What models could help independent creators retain value and build durable relationships with their audiences?

The quality of governance, and the vitality of civic life, shapes every other dimension of African development. Citizens across the continent are experimenting with participatory democracy, community accountability, digital civic infrastructure, and pan-African solidarity, while authoritarian pressures, weak institutions, and a legacy of top-down development planning continue to constrain civic space.

This area invites you to prototype institutions, civic systems, and public participation models that build the accountability, participation, anticipatory capacity, and institutional quality that regenerative development requires.

Question to explore
How might people participate in shaping institutions and decisions that affect their lives?

Relevant perspectives
Civil society organisations, civic technologists, public sector innovators, legal advocates, and community organisers

One possible inquiry
How could a local decision process make room for people whose knowledge is usually overlooked?

African fashion and textile production carries enormous cultural authority and growing global demand, yet much of the value chain remains inverted: raw fibre leaves the continent, finished garments return, and secondhand imports undercut local manufacturing while creating textile waste that African cities must manage. Craft knowledge, weaving, dyeing, tailoring, pattern, adornment, sits with makers who capture little of the value they generate.

This area invites you to reimagine African fashion as a site of cultural sovereignty, circular production, and ecological innovation: designing manufacturing models, material systems, ownership structures, and narratives in which making clothes regenerates rather than depletes.

Question to explore
How might fashion and textile systems connect cultural expression, dignified work and regenerative material cycles?

Relevant perspectives
Designers, weavers and dyers, textile manufacturers, circular-economy practitioners, material researchers, and cultural historians

One possible inquiry
What futures could a local repair and reuse network create for makers, wearers and textile waste?

Across African economies, people create value through farming, trade, care, craft, services, creative practice and enterprise. Yet the effort and knowledge that sustain everyday life do not always translate into a decent or dependable income. Access to customers, productive assets, finance and infrastructure shapes who can earn; ownership, bargaining power and the organisation of markets shape who keeps the value. Unpaid care, insecure work and limited social protection further influence the choices people can make, while technology, platform work and climate disruption reshape those conditions.

This area invites you to rethink the systems through which people work, organise, create value and earn: exploring enterprises, ownership arrangements, worker organisation, income models and forms of protection that make meaningful work and a good life possible. The ambition is for people to share fairly in the value they create, gain greater agency over their working lives and build livelihoods that support their households, communities and places.

Question to explore
How might we redesign the systems through which people work, create value and earn, so that more people can secure a decent income, do meaningful work and live well?

Relevant perspectives
Workers, informal-sector associations, independent practitioners, entrepreneurs, labour organisers, cooperative builders, care workers and livelihoods policy actors

One possible inquiry
How could a different model of ownership and payment improve both income security and meaningful work in one local sector?

Africa’s young people enter education systems and economies that do not always recognise the capabilities, knowledge and aspirations they bring. Formal education can remain oriented towards qualifications and employment pathways that offer limited room for different ways of learning, making and contributing. At the same time, learning already happens through apprenticeship, community practice, creative work, enterprise and everyday life. Local languages, practical knowledge and relationships carry possibilities that formal institutions can overlook.

This area invites you to explore education and learning futures that connect these strengths: reimagining curricula, learning spaces, apprenticeships, recognition and lifelong learning so that people can develop judgement, exercise agency and shape meaningful lives in changing societies.

Question to explore
How might learning systems help people build capabilities, exercise agency and shape the futures they value?

Relevant perspectives
Educators, learners, learning designers, apprenticeship networks, community knowledge holders, employers and education policy actors

One possible inquiry
What could a locally rooted learning pathway offer people whose capabilities are poorly recognised by existing credentials?

Digital infrastructure is being built across Africa at speed, and the decisions being made now, about who owns the platforms, where data sits, whose languages the models understand, and who is legible to the state, will constrain possibilities for decades. Much of this infrastructure is designed elsewhere, trained on other people's data, and monetised beyond the continent.

This area invites you to design African futures for AI, platforms, digital public infrastructure, and data sovereignty: prototyping governance models, protocols, datasets, tools, and public digital systems that serve African users as citizens rather than extractable markets.

Question to explore
How might digital systems strengthen agency, shared value and accountable decision-making?

Relevant perspectives
Technologists, AI and language researchers, digital rights advocates, data governance specialists, and public-sector digital teams

One possible inquiry
What would community influence over the use of local data look like, and which decisions would it change?

Capital shapes which futures become buildable. African enterprises face high costs of capital, instruments designed for other risk profiles, ownership structures that route returns offshore, and development finance that often arrives with predetermined theories of change, while long-standing African practices of collective saving, mutual credit, and community investment move significant value with little formal recognition.

This area invites you to investigate how capital, investment, ownership, and economic systems can better serve regenerative African development: designing financing instruments, ownership models, valuation approaches, and capital pathways that reward long-horizon, place-rooted value creation.

Question to explore
How might financial systems direct resources towards long-term wellbeing and the potential of places?

Relevant perspectives
Investors, development finance practitioners, cooperative and mutual finance organisers, economists, fintech builders, and policy actors

One possible inquiry
How could patient capital support a local enterprise network while giving communities a voice in its direction?

Movement is a defining feature of African life, labour migration, pastoral mobility, urbanisation, climate displacement, and dense diaspora connection, yet the dominant framing treats African mobility as a crisis to be contained, largely on terms set outside the continent. Borders inherited from partition cut across communities and economies, while visa, transport and administrative barriers can make movement within the continent restrictive.

This area invites you to examine how movement, borders, displacement, and diaspora connections may shape the continent's future, and to design mobility systems, legal and civic mechanisms, and narratives that treat movement as capability rather than failure.

Question to explore
How might systems of movement and settlement support dignity, belonging and opportunity?

Relevant perspectives
Migration researchers, diaspora networks, displaced communities, regional integration bodies, and legal advocates

One possible inquiry
What futures could improve the recognition of skills and the ability to build a livelihood after moving?

Africa holds a substantial share of the world's languages, yet education, law, technology, and formal knowledge production continue to run largely in colonial languages, shaping which ideas can be expressed with precision, whose memory is archived, and what futures can even be articulated. Language loss is also the loss of ecological, legal, and philosophical knowledge encoded nowhere else.

This area invites you to explore how language, memory, belonging, and cultural expression shape the futures Africa can imagine and inhabit: designing publishing and translation systems, language technology, archives and memory institutions, curricula, and cultural platforms that let people think and build in their own tongues.

Question to explore
How might languages, identities and living knowledge shape the futures people can imagine and create?

Relevant perspectives
Linguists, translators, publishers, archivists, educators, and heritage practitioners

One possible inquiry
How could local-language learning and publishing enable communities to shape how their futures are described?