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| Author(s): | The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network |
| Organisation: | The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network |
Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
For decades, technology has been dramatically changing not just the lives of individuals in developed countries, but increasingly the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the developing world. Whether it is a community mobile phone, a solar panel, a new farming practice, or a cuttingedge medical device, technology is altering the landscape of possibility in places where possibilities used to be scarce.
And yet looking out to the future, there is no single story to be told about how technology will continue to help shape — or even revolutionize — life in developing countries. There are many possibilities, some good and some less so, some known and some unknowable. Indeed, for everything we think we can anticipate about how technology and international development will interact and intertwine in the next 20 years and beyond, there is so much more that we cannot yet even imagine.
For philanthropies as well as for other organizations, this presents a unique challenge: given the uncertainty about how the future will play out, how can we best position ourselves not just to identify technologies that improve the lives of poor communities but also to help scale and spread those that emerge? And how will the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political conditions of the future enable or inhibit our ability to do so?
The Rockefeller Foundation believes that in order to understand the many ways in which technology will impact international development in the future, we must first broaden and deepen our individual and collective understanding of the range of possibilities. This report, and the project upon which it is based, is one attempt to do that. In it, we share the outputs and insights from a year-long project, undertaken by the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network (GBN), designed to explore the role of technology in international development through scenario planning, a methodology in which GBN is a long-time leader.
This report builds on the Rockefeller Foundation’s growing body of work in the emerging field of pro-poor foresight. In 2009, the Institute for Alternative Futures published the report Foresight for Smart Globalization: Accelerating and Enhancing Pro-Poor Development Opportunities, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. That effort was a reflection of the Foundation’s strong commitment to exploring innovative processes and embracing new pathways for insight aimed at helping the world’s poor. With this report, the Foundation takes a further step in advancing the field of pro-poor foresight, this time through the lens of scenario planning.
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