Sowing the Seeds of the Future in Colombia
With the support of UN Global Pulse, UNFPA worked with youth leaders, communities, and government officials on a participatory foresight initiative with the potential to flourish.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
If you look at trees that tower over your head, chances are that someone from a generation before yours actually planted them. But in the case of a participatory foresight project in Colombia, many of the people involved will get to see what they planted bloom into tangible outcomes for the country and its people.
The project — spearheaded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with support from UN Global Pulse — intentionally involved young leaders in Colombia in the co-creation of workshops and experiments to imagine the future they want to see. UNFPA Colombia refers to the initiative as “community foresight.”
But even better, the project wasn’t limited to the voices of young leaders. It also included community members and representatives from the country’s National Planning Department (DNP, for the name in Spanish: Departamento Nacional de Planeación) to engage in intergenerational dialogues.
Everything about this project’s design was intentional, including enough freedom for participants to explore ideas beyond conventional thinking. According to UNFPA Colombia, the organization has been working on public innovation with the Colombian government for three or four years to foster better planning. When the idea of applying foresight to the process came up, UNFPA turned to UN Global Pulse, having heard about its work with other members of the UN family.
UN Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab, is tasked with supporting the UN in becoming a more proactive, agile organization. Important aspects of this work are strategic foresight and experimentation — imagining futures and testing ideas to discover new solutions — and serving as a convener between the public and private sectors to catalyse and scale innovation.
UN Global Pulse assisted UNFPA in co-designing workshops and experiments to foster greater understanding of the future Colombia’s people — and by extension its government — wish to see.
As UNFPA´s innovation team in Colombia explains, many people in the country are “devastated” by poverty, inequality, and war, so they weren’t sure if people’s vision of the future would be too narrow. Yet by empowering people to actively participate, they were ultimately united around a set of visions for the future, such as working for peace, better health care, and more educational opportunities.
But not only did the initiative help participants envision what their future might be like, it also provided the tools to continue using participatory, community foresight from now on. What’s more, the initiative has already yielded results.
“We had three big wins so far,” says a UNFPA innovation team member. “We’ll be working with the national government to put foresight at the forefront of planning in Colombia for the next four years, which is actually included in the National Development Plan. We are also working with the Resident Coordination Office around foresight in the UN. And we now have future ambassadors that are working with us, which is the way we should keep working.”
Turning over the soil for fresh crops
In early 2022, UNFPA Colombia and government representatives participated in foresight training provided by UN Global Pulse. They agreed it was important to include young leaders from areas of the country where people’s voices are not always heard, inviting them to co-create activities to make foresight central to planning for both the government and the Colombian people.
“Traditionally the government and other groups like corporations have developed their own ideas they think will help the people,” says an Individual Consultant on UNFPA’s innovation team. “We wanted to change that traditional approach and include the expertise that people have from living their lives every day.”
The team agreed to bring in young leaders from two areas of Colombia: Chocó and Amazonas. According to UNFPA Colombia, not only are these regions often left out of policymaking, but they are also Indigenous and ethnic communities on the periphery of the country. Two leaders from each region were invited to help co-create the workshops, which began with training to help them understand the initiative and the concept of foresight.
“While we taught them about these things and how to lead a workshop, we also asked them some questions: What did they think about the future? How did they feel about talking about the future?” says UNFPA´s innovation team member.
Because foresight was new to the young leaders, the team used imagination — such as picturing themselves in a spaceship — and metaphors to create a language of foresight.
“In these regions, trees are very important: These are rainforests and jungle areas,” says UNFPA´s innovation team member. “A young leader proposed the idea, which everyone immediately agreed to, that a tree would be a great way to build the conversation around the future, because you have to plant a tree with the seed. But you have to nurture the seed and take care of it, and it can take years to really grow. Clearly, they understood the cycle of life and the tree made it much easier for them to connect to a future that might be two decades from now.”
With the concept of foresight firmly rooted in the minds of these young leaders, everyone was ready to co-design the workshops and exercises to be shared with a larger group.
Planting a diverse garden of input and ideas
The workshops the team created were multi-faceted and included about 30 people of all ages, often broken into smaller groups for easier discussions. There were culturally appropriate games to encourage conversations about topics ranging from education and employment to nature and museums. There were “field visits” where everyone, including government officials, could experience people’s lived reality. In addition, the workshops honoured diversity. Chocó and Amazonas are unique in Colombia, both ethnically and culturally, so what might work in one region may not be as effective in the other or somewhere else.
Alexis Damancio Silva, one of the leaders from Amazonas, is a member of the region’s Tikuna people. He has been supporting the Indigenous movement for 15 years and works in a number of environmental endeavours, among other projects. He is also part of the technical communication team designed to create a forum for dialogue between the Indigenous movement and the national government.
“I was happy to be part of the foresight training and one of the facilitators of the process,” he says. “I’m not only an Indigenous leader, but I’m also part of the LGBTI community, which is quite new to the Indigenous community. Overall, the project has given us tools to guide people of all ages to help build a better quality of life in all areas.”
Debbie Carolina Marin, one of the leaders from the Chocó region, is a mother and Afro-Colombian leader as well as an industrial engineer. She is the coordinator at the Chocó Robotics School, where children and young people learn to design, build, and implement solutions to the issues of their environment. She is passionate about empowering women and promoting education as a way to improve lives.
“This project has a great vision for young people and it was a great learning experience that really changed my perspective,” she says. “It’s a project that will break stereotypes and lead vulnerable people from Chocó to think about their future, which is not something they always do.”
Both Silva and Marin say the workshops helped expand participants’ thinking in areas including the environment, health, entrepreneurship, food security, education, and more. It helped them imagine what might be possible in the future.
When asked to share the most important thing they learned about foresight, they each had a unique answer.
“Humanity,” says Silva. “I will put humanity into all my projects as a fundamental value that allows me to build paths to peace.”
For Marin, the word is “trust.” She admits that trust does not come easily to her. “I learned how to generate trust in a team and trust others,” she says. “I also felt the dynamics of the workshop and being part of the co-design were challenging and fun, and made everyone feel included.”
Tending seedlings for a future where everyone can thrive
As for the Colombian government, there’s no question it recognizes the value of inclusion and participation.
“It fills me with hope to think that through a project like this we are really having an impact on communities and individuals that perhaps historically have been inhabited by hopelessness and distrust in the institutions,” says Lina Valencia, Director of Government, Human Rights, and Peace at the DNP.
Since 2021, the DNP has had a series of exchanges between UNFPA and UN Global Pulse, to expand its skills in public innovation.
“This project, in a way, allows us to really work with individuals and helps them understand that they can be agents not only of change, but protagonists of their own development,” Valencia says. “We understand what they expect, what they aspire to, and can prepare to meet those expectations. But they can also get involved and achieve that change together with us — or even in some cases, on their own.”
She admits it will take effort to rebuild trust in Colombia’s government. “But the moment people and institutions begin to change and understand each other,” she says, “we realise that we are all co-responsible for generating the change we want to see.”
UNFPA Colombia shares Valencia’s belief in the importance of showing individuals and communities that they are participants in co-creating their own future.
“If the people of the territories see that there is a shared vision and they are part of the debate, it’s very empowering,” says UNFPA´s innovation team member in Colombia. “We plan to scale this and continue this kind of work, because the government wants to be closer to the people of the territories.”
In fact, Valencia says she’s excited that the government intends to bring the tools from the workshops and exercises to people and communities.
“When I see that you contribute and I contribute and that we both see exactly the same future horizon that we want,” she says, “we are sowing seeds that we can start watering and see flourish.”
You can learn more about this initiative on our foresight microsite here or watch three short documentaries on the UNFPA — UN Global Pulse collaboration here (in Spanish with English subtitles).
