Community-Based Futuring: Towards Alternative and Meaningful Green Energy-Enabled Rural Futures

by Natalia | Sep 10, 2025 | Scientific publication

Community-Based Futuring: Towards Alternative and Meaningful Green Energy-Enabled Rural Futures

Abstract

Energy exclusion is prevalent throughout Africa, leading to a myriad of energy access projects, technologies, interventions and approaches being explored to address a phenomenon affecting over half the continent’s predominantly rural population. This is exhibited in a recent EU-funded energy access project involving partners, researchers and communities working across many African countries employing various approaches. In this paper, we unfold the employment of two divergent approaches, requirements elicitation and community-based co-design, in an attempt to determine and advance green energy inclusion and innovative use in a low-income, off-grid rural Namibian community. Thereafter, we reflect on the use of each approach, highlighting the need for an elevated and provocative approach that enables innovative and unorthodox energy inclusion permitting energy access and productive use in rural African communities.

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Inclusion of Namibian rural communities in green energy access and use: Requirements elicitation or community-based-co-design?

by Natalia | Sep 10, 2025 | Scientific publication

Inclusion of Namibian rural communities in green energy access and use: Requirements elicitation or community-based-co-design?

Abstract

Energy exclusion is prevalent throughout Africa, leading to a myriad of energyaccess projects, technologies, interventions and approaches being explored to address a phenomenon affecting over half the continent’s predominantly rural population. This is exhibited in a recent EU-funded energy access project involving partners, researchers and communities working across many African countries employing various approaches. In this paper, we unfold the employment of two divergent approaches, requirements elicitation and community-based co-design, in an attempt to determine and advance green energy inclusion and innovative use in a low-income, off-grid rural Namibian community. Thereafter, we reflect on the use of each approach, highlighting the need for an elevated and provocative approach that enables innovative and unorthodox energy inclusion permitting energy access and productive use in rural African communities.

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Recovering lost futures of the past: Situating alternative futures within an indigenous Afrocentric orientation and past trajectory

by Natalia | Sep 10, 2025 | Scientific publication

Recovering lost futures of the past: Situating alternative futures within an indigenous Afrocentric orientation and past trajectory

Abstract

This paper, contributing to decolonial design and futuring practice, promotes and explores the recovery of lost futures of the past. Through a series of sessions in a rural indigenous community in Southern Africa, we employ the Chameleon Innovation game as a participatory and community-based ideation method to co-design alternative future innovations and possibilities. The game, as an avenue through which participants accentuate lost indigenous cultural practices from the past, extends an Afrocentric indigenous orientation and past trajectory, enabling participants to actively engage these practices and situate alternative futures. This widens the spectrum within which futures and technologies are co-designed, enabling community participants to actively conceptualise alternative, yet situated, innovations in rural indigenous contexts.

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