At IFAnet, we believe societies that can imagine and prepare for their futures are better equipped to shape them. The African Futures Project formalises this commitment and brings a futures thinking approach to IFAnet’s work across media, culture, governance and development in Nigeria and the wider West African region.

The project draws on over fifteen years of IFAnet’s experience in information dissemination, community engagement and institutional capacity building, while extending this work into structured futures-oriented research, training and public engagement. The African Futures Project therefore, works to equip communities and institutions with the tools to think critically about emerging changes and to make informed, forward-looking choices.

Futures Thinking in Practice

The African Futures Project applies futures thinking across IFAnet’s core areas of intervention which includes education, governance, media and socio-economic development. We do this by:

• Building futures literacy through training programmes and workshops that enable individuals and institutions to anticipate and navigate change.
• Supporting evidence-based and participatory foresight processes within government and civil society.
• Developing context-specific methodologies that integrate local knowledge systems with global foresight practices.
• Creating spaces for public dialogue and deliberation around alternative futures for Nigeria and West Africa.

AI, Information Integrity and Inclusive Futures

As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes how information is produced, distributed and consumed, it introduces both new opportunities and significant risks. Within this context, The African Futures Project places a strong emphasis on inclusive and responsible AI.

Our focus is threefold:

1. Accessibility and Inclusion: We work to ensure that AI tools and knowledge are not limited to a small technical elite. Through training, public education, and partnerships, we aim to make AI understandable, usable and relevant to diverse communities, including those traditionally excluded from technological innovation.
2. Information Integrity: The rise of AI-generated content has intensified challenges around misinformation and disinformation. IFAnet builds on its media and information expertise to develop programmes that strengthen critical media literacy, support fact-checking ecosystems, and explore how AI itself can be deployed to identify and counter false or harmful information.
3. Ethical and Contextual AI Use: We advocate for AI systems that are responsive to local realities and grounded in the social and cultural contexts of West Africa. This includes promoting ethical standards, encouraging locally informed AI development, and ensuring that technological futures align with democratic values, cultural diversity and civic rights.

Our way forward

The major outcome of the project is to create an indigenous model for developing artificial intelligence, drawing from the epistemological repertoire of the system of divination within the Yoruba cultural ambience. Specifically, the project seeks to leverage the binary logic of the Ifa corpus as a system of classification and the quadruple gaming system of the Ayo. This will enable accessibility in terms of relational logic by indigenous end users, with the potential for applicability to serve as a model for pedagogy on artificial intelligence across different cultural contexts on the African continent. Beyond this, the ethos of the corpus would also guide the development of the model to serve as guardrails for ethical usage.