READSearchlight across the globe
'Horizon Scan' -- the newsletter of Searchlight Southern Africa
January 2012 Southern Africa Searchlight
Highlights:
- Survey of philanthropy and giving by ‘high net worth individuals’ in South Africa
- Thousands of students from six continents gather for US$ 1-million poverty challenge
- Calls mount for South Africa’s National Lotteries Board to be overhauled
- ‘African agriculture should be positioned as the main driver of change on the continent’
- Unintended consequences of the Dodd-Frank’s conflict minerals provision
- Intra-Africa trade may double on fewer barriers
- Cash-strapped Swazi university fails to open
- Africa’s defining political shift has been toward “arbitrary” rather than “true” democracy
- Mozambique's 'Mr Guebusiness'
- Free online open-source science and maths textbooks
- Dissecting service delivery protests
- New acid mine water treatment invented
- New freshwater ecosystem atlas shows which rivers and wetlands to keep in a natural condition
- Small companies get online for free
- Cape Town Science Hack Day is themed around science for development
- Crowd sourcing for anti-corruption
About Searchlight Southern Africa
- Horizon or environmental scanning is the job of Searchlight Southern Africa, another South Africa Node initiative.
- Searchlight Southern Africa is a horizon scanning and trend monitoring service for globalisation-related issues in the Southern African region.
- Ten countries are included in the project's scope: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Countries beyond this group of ten are considered, too, when relevant.
- Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, it contributes to the Rockefeller Foundation’s international Searchlight initiative.
- What the project does:
- Monitors journals, newspapers, books, grey literature and e-texts in, from and about the region.
- Aggregates trend information on a monthly basis.
- Shares this knowledge with futurists' networks.
- Tracks trends that include:
- Poverty.
- Development and donors.
- Economics.
- Politics.
- Environment.
- Social development.
- Science, technology and innovation.
Searchlight across the globe
Searchlight Southern Africa, an initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation being implemented by the South Africa Node of the Millennium Project, is part of a global network. See the editorial article “Why Foresight?” published in Intellecap’s Beyond Profit magazine for a description of the Searchlight function and the importance of pro-poor foresight.
See other documents from the Searchlight Project:
- 2011: Searchlight Convening: The Future of the Urban Poor, Mumbai
- 2010: Searchlight Report: Building a Searchlight Function, Bellagio
- 2009: Foresight for Smart Globalization: Accelerating & Enhancing Pro-Poor Development Opportunities, Bellagio
Learn more about horizon scanning
"We need a better understanding of the present, not just the future, and for that reason horizon scanning is a sense-making tool for understanding better the complexity of the present and also the future," says Tanja Hichert, scenario planning practitioner and futurist, and owner-director of Hichert and Associates.
Here are useful links to information about horizon scanning:
> A Slideshare presentation on horizon scanning from a research methods festival in Oxford.
> From Shaping Tomorrow, a practical foresight guide.
> An example of how horizon scanning is used for thinking critically about the UK's jobs market of tomorrow.
> The South Africa Node of the Millennium Project's 2010 presentation on horizon scanning, the Searchlight Project and futures research.
Contact Searchlight Southern Africa
You can get hold of Searchlight Southern Africa in the following ways:
- Email: Click on this link to open an online email form -- and Tanja Hichert, from Hichert and Associates Pty (Ltd), will get back to you.
- Landline: +27 21 8555 839.
- Mobile: +27 82 576 6429.
Get involved
Futurologists, scenario planners, futurists -- experienced and enthusiastic -- who want to contribute to Searchlight Southern Africa should get hold of Tanja Hichert by email.
