Cultivating imaginations for a decolonized future

When women in Dankawalie, a remote village in Sierra Leone, gathered to imagine the future, they voiced their deep concern about the rise of drug use and teen pregnancies in rural areas. They wanted to be directly involved in tackling those problems and explicitly connected their own futures to those of their children.

The women’s anchoring of their imagined futures to those of young people contrasts with conventional narratives that keep generations in silos. As one participant put it bluntly, “We cannot be empowered as long as our children are not.”

Stronger solidarity across generations was just one reframing of the future that emerged among women taking part in multiple two-day sessions designed to surface the assumptions they use to imagine their futures. The set of activities inspired the women to break the hold of deeply entrenched gender norms that routinely undervalue their work.

Tapping into traditions

The Futures Literacy Laboratories approach developed by UNESCO was central to this two-year action research project supported by IDRC to explore the future of women in Sierra Leone. In addition to the small northeastern village of Dankawalie, steeped in tradition, laboratories were held in a mid-sized town, Makeni, and in the capital, Freetown, in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs.

The project also laid the foundation for a new Futures Literacy Centre at the University of Makeni. Project leader Kewulay Kamara, a teacher and poet descended from a long line of Dankawalie storytellers, holds the university’s UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, Story‐telling and Anticipation. He worked alongside women of the village as they tapped into local performance and storytelling traditions to imagine futures unconstrained by colonial narratives.

The Futures Literacy Laboratories approach invites people to dive into collective reflections about their society, economy and culture. Participants become acutely aware of how their perceptions and choices are shaped by the power of their imagination.

“After travelling through different futures, we are better able to re-examine the present and challenge our perceptions of it,” said project team member Kwamou Eva Feukeu, an anticipation specialist and lawyer at the Max Planck Institute for Private Law in Germany.

Challenging external assumptions

In Makeni, the laboratories led some of the women participants to underscore that much of their work outside of the formal economy (as farmers, cooks, tailors, janitors) goes unrecognized. Their preferred futures highlighted the importance of reversing this disempowerment, not so much directly at the expense of men as by addressing the social and economic conditions that systematically give lower value to women and the activities they engage in.

Riel Miller, a futures literacy pioneer who worked on the project, explains that the visions and biases of others become clear as the participants liberate themselves from the limits of mainstream gender and development policies that are confined to the familiar, dominant behavioural patterns and power structures.

“The labs initiate a shift away from efforts that merely embellish other people’s visions of the future — ‘let’s improve “development’ — toward another kind of empowerment, sourced from within the women’s local history and conditions. Here the community’s activities and relationships, from marriage and agriculture to gender and governance, find sustenance in a more genuine kind of respect, one that springs from within.”

Co-operative design is key

The researchers propose anticipatory action research as one pathway for communities to reclaim their agency in shaping their futures. Any such process, including Futures Literacy Laboratories, must be locally led, rooted in local contexts and co-operatively designed by all stakeholders.

This cognitive time travel doesn’t just happen, as the laboratories in Sierra Leone demonstrated.

“A lot of work was done beforehand to make sure the activity was fuelled from within,” Feukeu said. “An important part of this project was building capacity among 10 Sierra Leonean futures researchers. We spent six months at the outset working with them to design the activities and decide on participants.” Two of those researchers, Admire Mamie Iye Ashley Moiwo and Ibrahim Joseph Conteh, joined Feukeu in showcasing project results at the Dubai Future Forum 2023.

Miller also stressed the importance of having local champions who can select the lab participants. “The co-design really is critical for ensuring the people who are invited are going to be willing to engage in an emotive process,” he said. “For the future is not just anything — it's the future of your children; it's the future of the planet.” 

Decolonizing development  

The Sierra Leone initiative grew out of an IDRC-funded study in which Feukeu, Miller and other researchers reflected on the concept of decolonizing the future. 

In short, the future is a valuable resource that should be regarded as a vital public good, freely available to all, the researchers state. However, the future can be commodified, becoming a privatized domain with access and control limited to a select few. And the future can also be colonized, with dominant worldviews and mindsets shaping how it is imagined and reinforcing colonial power structures. 

“Development, maybe more than any other field, has a duty to pay close attention to the future, Feukeu said. “We should spend more time challenging the type of futures we produce. We tend to reproduce problematic presents or the problematic past. That is also true of development projects for which we pre-identify the outcomes and how we will assess whether those outcomes are met.” 

The Futures Literacy Laboratories offer a rich participatory action research method to democratize futures thinking. In Sierra Leone, they revealed a disconnect between the empowered futures projected in certain government laws and policies that were often influenced by players outside the country and the lived experiences, histories and cultures of many of the participating women. For them, it was not just question of catching-up with so-called higher achieving parts of the world. They expressed different conceptions of leadership in both formal and informal institutions, of financial dependence and independence, and of nurturing harmony or disharmony with the family and community, to name just a few topics detailed in the initiative's final technical report. 

Riel Miller has noted a shift taking place around the world, with “communities turning to their own imaginations. They’re saying, ‘We respect the imaginations of people in the past and around us today, including those in power, but we’re also cultivating our own imaginations because it enriches what we can feel and see and do together.’” 

Contributors: Fraser Reilly-King, senior analyst, and Colleen Duggan, team leader, IDRC; Kwamou Eva Feukeu, anticipation specialist and complexity researcher, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law; Riel Miller, senior fellow at the École des Ponts Business School in France, the University of New Brunswick in Canada and the University of Stavanger in Norway. 

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