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Guest post Blog by Evalin Karijo. Evalin is one of two Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) network members Small Foundation supported to attend the 2025 School of International Futures (SOIF) foresight retreat.
Editor’s note: In this guest post, the author explores how foresight tools used in leadership and systems work can be applied in practice, drawing on experience from adolescent girls’ programmes. This aligns with Small Foundation’s wider focus on foresight capability, leadership, and systemic change across Africa.
This past summer, I had the honor of joining global practitioners and changemakers at the SOIF 2025 Retreat in Winchester, England. It was a week that stretched my imagination and reminded me that the future is not a distant place; it’s a story we are already writing.
As a leader working on adolescent girls’ programs and policies in the global south, the retreat reminded me of what I have learned repeatedly through our work at the Population Council’s Girl Innovation, Research, and Learning (GIRL) Center: the future is not abstract for girls. It is immediate. It is personal.
The Global Reality Girls are Navigating
Globally, there are more than 1.3 billion adolescents, and girls make up nearly half of that population. Yet for many of them, adolescence is marked by constraint rather than opportunity. Globally, 1 in 5 young women aged 20 to 24 years old is married before their 18th birthday, compared to 1 in 30 young men. Each year, an estimated 12 million girls aged 15–19 give birth, along with more than 300,000 girls aged 10–14, often with long-term consequences for their health, education, and economic prospects. These numbers matter because they shape futures, not just for individual girls, but for communities and economies. The cost of failing to invest in adolescent girls is staggering, with some estimates suggesting up to $110 trillion in lost economic productivity by 2050 if current trends continue.
Living and Leading Through Uncertainty
Working on adolescent girls’ programs and policies means living with uncertainty as a day-to-day reality. Funding cycles shift without warning. Policy windows open and close. Crises, including economic shifts, and climate change, arrive unannounced and often hit girls hardest.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen these pressures in very real ways. Our teams have spent time listening to adolescent girls across different regions of the continent. Their experiences vary, but a common thread runs through them: girls are constantly adapting to change.
In arid and semi-arid counties, girls spoke to us about how drought and climate shocks affect their schooling. When water sources dry up, girls are often the ones who walk longer distances to fetch water, leaving little time or energy for schoolwork. Some described missing weeks of school during severe droughts, not because they lacked motivation, but because their families needed them to help the household survive.
Yet even in these conversations, girls did not frame themselves as passive victims of global crisis. They were thinking ahead, connecting environmental realities today with the kind of communities they want to live in tomorrow.
In urban informal settlements, a different set of challenges is experienced. Girls share experiences about how they fear harassment on the way to school, lack of safe sanitation facilities, and overcrowded classrooms. These moments often shaped whether they stayed in school. One girl shared that her biggest worry wasn’t academic performance, it was whether she would get home safely in the evening.
Whenever these insights are brought into our policy conversations, they shift how decision-makers understand girls’ priorities and needs. Girls are already navigating uncertainty with remarkable clarity about what they want for their futures. These insights affirm the need to involve girls in programs and discussions about their future so that initiatives are from a girl’s lens and can effectively meet their needs.
Lessons from SOIF 2025 that Stayed with Me
The SOIF retreat introduced us to frameworks such as Three Horizons, scenarios building, and horizon mapping. These tools help bridge the gap between long-term vision and short-term action. Foresight helps leaders and communities be more aware of past and emerging trends, imagine alternative futures, and think through how our decisions today shape what’s possible tomorrow.
During the retreat, we were asked to imagine futures that we’d want to see globally. Our focus for the retreat was on driving long term climate action at a global level. We used a scenarios approach. It was exciting to be part of the knowledge-sharing by experts and participants during these sessions. Ideas that were shared for the future include a world where the climate agenda belongs to everybody, and people have agency at personal and community level to take preferred actions, human desire for good health which in turn drives climate justice, as well as glocalization (participatory approaches and responsible citizenry).
Throughout the retreat, a few ideas stayed with me:
The need to open up foresight to everyone. We can only talk about the future when we’re including everyone, from communities to policymakers. If everyone had the space to explore how change might affect their world, and plan for it, we would have much better policies and programs.
Power and inclusion matter. At the retreat, we talked a lot about who gets to define the future. For our work with adolescent girls, this question hits home. Too often, others make decisions for them, not with them. True foresight gives them a seat at the table, and the confidence to speak up.
Think long, act now. It’s easy to focus only on what’s urgent. But the best leaders find balance in solving today’s challenges while keeping an eye on the long term. That’s what we learned about when spotlighting intergenerational fairness and making choices that serve both today and tomorrow.
Storytelling is a powerful tool. Facts are important, but stories move people. Sharing real experiences like the marginalized groups who use their voice to change school policy, makes futures work relatable. Stories connect the head, heart, and hands.
Collaboration is everything. No single sector or organization can change the system alone. The magic happens where disciplines and generations meet when we build coalitions that cross boundaries.
Bringing Foresight Home: Co-designing with and for girls
As we enter the post-UN Summit of the Future period, this is an opportunity for the global community to move from ideas to action, especially in improving the wellbeing of adolescent girls.
In many ways, foresight feels natural to our context in Kenya. Communities have always planned for uncertain futures, through storytelling, and collective memory. What modern foresight does is give us the language and structure to bring that wisdom into global systems that often undervalue local knowledge.
For me, that means continuing to create awareness on foresight, and co-creating tools that make futures thinking accessible across our adolescent-girls’ ecosystem. The future will not wait for us to be ready. But with collaboration, we can be future-ready now.
When I was back to my daily work, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to make these ideas part of our work. At the GIRL Center, where I lead policy and partnerships, we’re beginning to weave foresight into our work with girls.
We have integrated futures thinking and scenario thinking into co-creation workshops with one of our networks- the Girls Deliver community, a community of over 70 organizations working with and for girls globally. We are currently developing a roadmap for change towards 2030 for adolescent girls. We used foresight to anticipate possible futures for girls, including risks and opportunities, around the shrinking funding for gender and adolescents, the rollback of rights for girls, climate resilience, and digital inclusion.
For us, the goal isn’t to predict the future. It’s to prepare for it and create a strong, resilient ecosystem where adolescent girls thrive.
Over the next year, we hope to implement our roadmap for change for adolescent girls, towards 2030. We hope to integrate futures thinking into other global dialogues, to make sure young women’s voices are heard when decisions about the future are being made.
The energy from the retreat is still with us. Foresight is becoming less of a buzzword and more of a mindset. One that helps us design policies and programs that stay relevant in a changing world.
