Institute for Alternative Futures

A free toolkit for communities, countries, and regions to explore their own futures
IAF has developed a free "pro-poor scenario toolkit" for use by communities, countries, and regions to develop scenarios of their own futures that explicitly include poor and marginalized populations.

Pro-Poor Scenario Toolkit: Workshop Materials and Global Forecasts for 2039

A sheet of "ground rules" for the scenario workshop can be found here.






How can the poor participate in shaping our global future? While many corporations, organizations, and government agencies frequently apply foresight methods, poverty is rarely included as an explicit issue for consideration.  To change that, the Institute for Alternative Futures, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, has developed an approach to applying foresight methods to expand social and economic opportunities for poor and marginalized populations worldwide.

As part of this effort, IAF convened a workshop of leading foresight experts at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference facilities in Bellagio, Italy on March 16-20, 2009.  The meeting, which was co-chaired by Leon Fuerth and David Jhirad, highlighted the rationale and practice of pro-poor foresight in accelerating and enhancing “smart globalization” and in gaining a better understanding of foresight in relation to a set of key issues that are relevant to the global South.

The full report on the 2009 conference:  Foresight for Smart Globalization: Accelerating & Enhancing Pro-Poor Development Opportunities