The Africa Travel Guide 2050 is an invitation to imagine an African-centric future for the peoples and landscapes of the continent.

It was developed by Wilderness Foundation Africa as one outcome from a futures-thinking workshop hosted in October 2024, where participants explored possible conservation pathways for Africa to 2050. The futures-thinking approach used speculative storytelling and design to imagine how communities, ecosystems, and technologies may evolve in response to climate, biodiversity and sustainability challenges and opportunities currently playing out across the continent.

Futures thinking helps us navigate complexity and uncertainty by exploring alternative possibilities, encouraging long-term, creative, and integrated systems-based scenarios. Futures-thinking helps us ask different kinds of questions: what futures are plausible, what kind of future do we actually want, and what would it take to get us there?

Through the lens of travel writing, this Africa Travel Guide 2050 brings the aspirational positive  future to life: the places you might visit, the people you might meet, the conservation breakthroughs you might witness were we to overcome the social and ecosystem sustainability challenges. Every scenario is rooted in real trends, real challenges, and real possibilities emerging from within Africa today. The positive futures described here are ones we could achieve were we to implement the strategies described in the full workshop report.

The Guide emerged from a collaborative futures-thinking workshop  in which participants – drawn from across the continent’s conservation, policy, and development sectors – were tasked to think boldly and realistically about Africa’s future. Their insights, concerns and aspirations shaped the scenarios you will find in these pages. It is thus a collective act of imagination – and the futures we imagine are the futures we can get!

Read the full workshop report here.