Institute For The Future

Kenya Youth Scenarios, a personal perspective

 

Last June I had the pleasure of facilitating the Eastern province Kenya Youth Scenarios workshop on behalf of Institute of Economic Affair’s (IEA) Futures Programme after observing their Western province workshop.

 

Katindi Sivi Njonjo–who heads the futures department at IEA–first conceived of the Kenya Youth Scenarios project to help Kenyans constructively deal with the impending youth bulge. The idea was to help each region within Kenya create their own scenarios about the future of youth in Kenya (youth in Kenya is from 18-35 years). From these scenarios IEA is hoping that not only will regular Kenyans—as I can say they have already begun to do—have a more nuanced conversation about youth issues, but so will the Kenyan government.

Until now, youth problems have been understood as consisting of unemployment and lack of education. But the issues faced by youth in Kenya, and the world over, are much more complex and localized. The Kenya Youth Scenarios have been designed to bring out the nuanced and regional issues that Kenyan youth face, issues which could either be catalysts for innovation and growth or an impending time bomb in the face of a national youth bulge.

Eight different workshops across the eight provinces of Kenya walked regional youth leaders through a scenario building process.

The workshops began with getting everyone on the same page regarding where we are today. To do this task, IEA created the Youth Fact Book which is the first time ever that facts about Kenyan youth have been aggregated under one roof, and then disaggregated by age, region, and sex to give a more in-depth picture of what really is happening with youth today. The Kenya Youth Scenarios workshops were designed brilliantly to slowly ease the youth leaders into the world of futures thinking and scenario planning, while preparing them to create their own scenarios grounded in within reality.

 

Each workshop created a scenario matrix with two bi-polar drivers that were deemed the most important for that region. The Western workshop I observed chose access to relevant and quality education and access to technology as their bi-polar drivers. The Eastern workshop I facilitated chose governance and employment as their bi-polar drivers. Other regions chose the land tenure system, the economy, globalization, civic participation, and constitutionalism. Technology and governance were the most pervasive bi-polar drivers however.

 

In order to reach a group consensus on the two main drivers for the scenario matrix, the participants went through extensive discussion of all local and global drivers that are effecting youth in their region. This is where things got interesting. Western province talked a lot about retrogressive cultural practices including polygamy, early marriage, and witchcraft. They also spent a lot of time talking about gender equality and what I interpreted as broken marriages coming from a lack of trust on all sides. Eastern province, due to its larger geographical size and increased tribal diversity had difficulty talking about local drivers as a group. They did however discus the underdevelopment and marginalization of northern Eastern province, as well as their retrogressive cultural practices like female genital mutilation. For Ukambani they talked about witchcraft vs. traditional healers, and for the Mount Kenya region they spoke about farming challenges in the face of climate change and increasingly smaller farmland due to population increases. Both regions spoke at length about the difficulty of being a youth leader due to a plethora of contradictory traditional and modern practices. For more on this topic stay tuned. The coast province workshop spoke a lot about drug abuse issues, and a feeling that the government is providing drugs to the region–either directly or by not doing enough to keep them out–in order to keep the population sedated. Northeastern province spoke about the difficult of getting ID cards and the extreme sense of separation from the rest of Kenya. Homosexuality was also a very common topic in all workshops, people were generally looking forward to a future where everyone is free to be as they wish. As you can see the issues that youth in Kenya face are as diverse as they are plentiful.

 

Being able to spend June with IEA was in part a chance for me to understand the cross-cultural uses of scenario building. I was perhaps a bit surprised to learn that the process itself looked very much similar to what we do in the US with a few minor differences.

 

A difference between futures thinking in the US/EU and Africa is that within the African context, as Katindi pointed out, futures thinking needs to be very practical, it cannot be an exercise in thinking for the sake of thinking. People won’t buy into the process and participate if there are not real practical solutions that come out of the process.

 

The Kenya Youth Scenarios were largely thinking exercises for the participants, but because the topic matter was something that very directly affected their daily lives–from trying to run for a seat in parliament as a youth leader (remember youth in Kenya go to about 35 years of age) to being a youth organizer who has felt the hand of repressive governments through prison and torture, to being president of the National Youth Council–having the opportunity to understand the potential challenges for youth in Kenya through the holistic lens of scenario planning became practical. Additionally, the brief training in scenario planning that the participants received opened up a new tool for each of them to use in their businesses or organizations that many seemed very excited about.

 

The practicality issues comes into play for me when dealing with very real social time bombs, like the youth bulge (Kenya Youth Scenarios), the end of apartheid (Monte Fleur scenarios), and the consequences of prolonged bad governance and poor economic system (Kenya 2027 scenarios). This is in stark difference to creating scenarios about futures that may or may not affect our daily lives in a profound way, a luxury we have in the US and Europe.

Perhaps most exciting for me was the unity and desire to act that the group felt after the process. Not only have they built up a network of people who are passionate about youth issues—and by extension, change—but they also have a common language and a common vision for the future of Kenya. They have seen the potential for a positive future and what might happen if nothing changes. Some of the comments from the participants can describe this best:

“The workshop made it clear that thinking about the future in a very complex manner is possible, and that it is important.”

“If nothing is done about youth in Kenya, then we are heading to destruction. But if we do something then we might be able to go somewhere.”

“I Seen the four scenarios we built and have seen the possibility of any of those things taking place. Right now my mind is really aggressive about what is happening next. What can we do about it? What will we do about it? It’s not enough to just have knowledge, but you have to do something about it.”

“Building scenarios means looking at the issues very critically. We need to get proper meaning. Coming together and discussing the issues we have together has really opened our minds."

“We have united with the same variables, what if Kenya as a whole could stand up with a similar scenario?”

“The common language we created has helped to unite this group.”

 

Another difference was the need to address religion directly. Kenya is a devoutly religious society, whether you belong to the approximately 85% Christian community or the 15% Muslim community. As such, it’s necessary to have a religious based conversation about why we care about the future. This was particularly apparent in the Northeastern province workshop where young male youth leaders said they typically plan to have 40 children (with the help of 4 wives), inshallah. In a region that suffers from close to zero commerce, regular famines, and a poor and irrelevant education system, young people still plan to have 40 children without a thought to their ability to feed, yet alone educate their children because god will provide. There was no thought beyond god to their future or a need to prepare for that future, after all, inshallah.

The problem of rationalizing why we should even think about the

future was directly dealt with through a discussion of budgets and what

we do with our paychecks. This is a useful metaphor for the youth

leaders because for the most part you can be sure they have some source

of steady income, and at least strive towards the ability to create a

rainy-day fund. Additionally, the use of many metaphors and examples of

other useful African scenarios like the Kenya 2027 scenarios and the

South African Monte Fleur scenarios created a group understanding of the

usefulness of thinking about the future from many different

perspectives before the future becomes the present. Scenario planning,

to some extent, is perhaps better suited for countries like Kenya where

metaphors and story telling are part of the cultural history.

IEA is currently writing up a report on the scenarios, creating a scenario booklet, and producing a documentary on the experience and to showcase the scenarios to help conduct further dialouge and influence policy.

Stay tuned for another post on my experiences in South Africa working with the South Africa Node of the Millennium Project and their Foresight for Development (FFD) initiative designed to spread futures thinking throughout Africa. I will also utilize this platform, and the experts at my finger tips in SA, to conduct interviews and research for my Foresight for Peace innitiative which you can read more about on FFD in the coming months.