Announcing the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Awards for 2022
We are delighted to announce the winners and awardees for NGFP Awards 2022, our 5th cohort since NGFP's launch in 2018.
About the 2022 awards
The Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) awards is an initiative by SOIF. The awards recognise the next generation's endeavours in shaping the future. Launched in April 2018, the ambition was to support young leaders and innovators around the world as they drive foresight practice in their communities. Today, the awards are part of a broader programme that is nurturing an international network of foresight practitioners to come together and develop personally, professionally, and collectively. We advocate for their integral role in agenda-setting, and connect them with today’s decision-makers at the highest levels.
We have had a fantastic set of applications in 2022. This year, the NGFP awards have great gender diversity and winners representing 14 countries and six regions. The Environment is the big protagonist in the winning applications, with eight of the 19 selected projects focusing on environmental issues - including the Main Award. Five of them are specifically tackling climate change and two highlight the interdependence of all beings. The second most explored topic is entrepreneurship, which is the core aspect of four projects. Technology plays a big role this year and, in a lesser amount, art is also present, with a couple of projects using artifacts and storytelling for scenario building.
Participatory approaches are unanimous among the winning projects, and more than a half are explicitly working with marginalised communities and emphasising the importance of having these voices properly represented in the futures field. Most of them are hoping that their initiatives will inform policies for good and we do too. Because the future that these projects are collectively designing are definitely worth living.
Please join us in congratulating the fellows and all the applicants this year.
Main Award
This year the Joseph Jaworski Main Award (USD 10,000) goes to Melissa Ingaruca, from Peru. Her project is a summer school for people to go through a foresight journey in order to envision and create multispecies cities futures. "We need to transform cities that expand at the cost of the biosphere integrity to multispecies cities that restore ecological functions and allow all species to thrive", says Melissa.
The quality of proposals were so good, that this year we decided to have a Runner-up Award (USD 2,500), besides three sectoral awards (USD 1,000) - Security and Technology, Existential Risk, and Intergenerational Fairness. These last two are being awarded for the first time. In addition, 20 future-alert activists are being recognised as NGFP Fellows for their work in a particular sector or geography.
Main AwardsWalkabout Prizes
The Walkabout Prizes (USD 1,000 each) showcase the work of 18-25 year-olds specifically. The Prizes celebrate the curiosity and sense of exploration in younger futures practitioners. They aim to support applicants who are likely to be earlier on in their careers or styling and possibly brand new to the world of foresight.
This year, Walkabout Prize winner, Siddhi, from India, are conducting speculative design and storytelling processes with farmers so they can create alternative agricultural futures. "What would technology look like if it was developed in smaller places like Melghat instead of Silicon Valley?", she wonders.
Whereas Yuri, the other Walkabout Prize winner, from Italy, is developing a geo-spatial consensus system to increase the efficiency in the development of complex geographic future scenarios. He will start with climate chage future scenarios in European coastal ares.
Walkabout PrizesAll NGFP fellows have access to mentorship, foresight capacity building, and support to access new funding opportunities, participate in relevant international events, and connect with experts, futurists, and policymakers.
Young Voices
In collaboration with Teach the Future, the Young Voices awards showcase the voices, hopes, and projects of youth 12 to 17-year-olds. Youth from all over the world submit their ideas on how to make the world a better place. The projects must demonstrate a clear connection with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This year, Nataly and Stephanie, also from Peru, are the Young Voices Winners (USD 1,000). They developed a project to manufacture sanitary pads made of banana peel bioplastic. Besides being biodegradable, the production also promotes farmers' economy by remunerating them for peels that would, otherwise, be discarded.
Three runners-up will receive USD 500 prize to also accelerate their proposals. Six other top finalists are also recognised for their ideas and efforts in building a better future.
Young VoicesFinally, we would like to extend our gratitude and appreciation to all our 2022 judges. Without their help, it would not be possible to make the awards a reality.
If you'd like to get in touch, find out more about collaborating with the Sensing Network, and explore how to support our 2022 fellows, please contact us
Our NGFP2022 Winners and Awardees
Main Award

Melissa Ingaruca
Winner, 2022
PeruMelissa is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher committed to envisioning how urban design can restore biosphere integrity. Her project, "Future Tinkering: Do-it-yourself transformations to multispecies cities", is a Berlin-based summer school for people to envision and create multispecies city futures, cities designed for all living beings. Participants will go on a transdisciplinary foresight journey with a series of design and scenario building workshops to: i) deconstruct their worldviews and imaginaries around cities; ii) embody simulations of other species' sensorial worlds through art-based methods and immersive technologies; iii) learn how to co-fabricate with other living organisms and systems through biofabrication techniques.

Adam Sharpe
Intergenerational Fairness (IGF) Award (Funded) 2022
United KingdomWhat will the future be like when our populations are predominantly aged?" Adam will use gamification to engage intergenerational audiences in the exploration of the long-term consequences of population decline on our world. The inputs will contribute to the development of a serious game to enable policymakers, leaders, and concerned citizens to better anticipate and prepare for the impacts of demographic change. The ultimate goal of the game is to raise awareness of demographic change as a critical megatrend, to engage diverse audiences in the topic, and to inspire policies and behaviours that integrate the concerns and respect the rights of present and future generations.

Alija Blackwell
Runner-Up and N. America Award (Funded) 2022
United StatesAlija will facilitate collective speculative art-making workshops to prototype artefacts of just climate transition futures that centre the visions of historically marginalised communities directly impacted by climate change. This collection of artefacts will then be part of a multimedia sensory platform to visualise the collective imagination of frontline communities about climate futures. The platform will serve as a global resource for climate preparedness, civic engagement, and collective decision-making towards futures that benefit humanity and broader impacted ecologies. Alija envisions climate futures where legacies of harm are disrupted and the planning process for our collective futures is regenerative.

Courteney Mukoyi
Policy Award 2022
ZimbabweVote Bot is an artificial intelligence solution to increase youth and women's participation in elections in Zimbabwe. Accessible on WhatsApp, the platform makes it easier for young people and women to register to vote and educate them about their electoral rights and the electoral process in the country, in compliance with Zimbabwe's Constitution and Electoral Act. This is one of the projects run by Courteney at his Justice Code Foundation, an organisation focused on legal tech and civic tech solutions. Vote Bot was created in consultation with local communities, using a human-centred design approach, and is now being disseminated in rural areas, in partnership with two community-based organisations.

Daniel Odediran
Africa Award 2022
NigeriaBy working within the Startup Support, Advisory, and Investment Ecosystems across the African continent, Daniel has observed that startup founders are not only more prone to failure due to the extreme volatility of their political, economic, and financial landscapes, but also fail by copying Western solutions that do not necessarily work for their context. For him, the antidote is increasing founders' Futures literacy and foresight skills. He will deliver participatory futures workshops for startup founders across the continent and provide a web platform for interaction between African entrepreneurs. Daniel's hope is to catalyse Africa's economic development through forward-thinking innovations with the potential to transform societies; take people out of poverty and improve the quality of life for all.

Dhanasree Jayaram
Security and Technology Award (Funded) 2022
IndiaSolar geoengineering refers to a set of speculative technologies to lower global temperatures by artificially intervening in the climate systems of our planet. Up until now, the discourse, development, and governance around it has been largely dominated by the Global North. As a Social Scientist, Dhanasree is investigating whether or not solar geoengineering would be an option for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis in the future, whether these choices would limit their mitigation and adaptation options, and to what extent this would have implications for geopolitics and security. She will conduct research with Global South countries to explore these questions and uncover their imagined futures around climate justice and equity.

Edson Niwamanya
Social Entrepreneurship Award 2022
UgandaTackle social problems like poverty through entrepreneurship education and skills development for grassroots community members across ages and demographics. Edson and his team are creating empowerment spaces that equip marginalised people to become the next generation of leaders, start their social businesses, and solve the biggest problems in their communities. His project uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guide for participants to develop social business ideas that tackle significant issues in marginalised communities, such as poverty and poor healthcare. Using strategic foresight, Edson and his peers decided to set up an organization to facilitate replicating their model in different countries. So far, they have been able to set up eight empowerment spaces.

Goodness Chama
Agriculture Award 2022
NigeriaGoodness is committed to increasing efficiency in crop and livestock farming. He has a business which uses the System Dynamics technology to manage and integrate the production of several agricultural and livestock products into one sustainable, more productive, and profitable system. When updated with a farmer's data, the technological model projects future operations, provides valuable insights on possible growth patterns and challenges, and offers suggestions for risk mitigation and resources needed. Goodness plans to train farmers on how to use and operate this model so they can do business projections, forecast, run scenarios, interpret results, and extract valuable information on the current and future state of their businesses.

Julie Reindl
Europe Award 2022
GermanyJulie will conduct workshops with scientists and civil society communities to explore perceptions and imaginaries around climate engineering - large-scale interventions on Earth's climate system. She believes that, be it positive or negative, the impacts of climate engineering on our lives can be difficult to comprehend. It requires collective imagining as well as telling nuanced and place-specific stories. She will, then, use language reflective foresight tools to create new narratives and climate-engineering metaphors to enable more democratic public technology debates.

Julius Lindsay
Existential Risk (XR) Award (Funded) 2022
CanadaPrismatic is a futures game targeted at climate action groups. Julius envisions that, while climate action groups working across Canada play the game, they navigate through current society, sectors and trends, and build future climate scenarios. Through a crowd-sourced platform, these groups, climate change and foresight experts synthesize the data generated by the game. Indigenous and Afro-futurist artists then create various art expressions based on the synthesized dataset, and their art is disseminated to different communities, creating change in the current paradigm around climate action in the country.

Kalyani Jayant Tupkary
Innovative Methods Award 2022
IndiaCalendar Collective is a design-led research investigation that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. Through co-designed workshops, Kalyani wants to expose foresight practitioners to other ways of occupying time. Insights from these workshops will be used to develop alternate calendars or timekeepers that could enable people to inhabit temporalities of their choice. Responding to the erasure of indigenous temporalities through global imposition of the Gregorian calendar, she proposes alternate calendars as decolonization tools to unearth notions of time that have always existed and still do. Calendar Collective is a reminder that calendars are designed tools and can, therefore, be redesigned.

Navyashree Gunjur Vedachala
Asia Award 2022
IndiaIt is currently hard for newcomers to a field - especially related to technologically advanced tools - to be given work opportunities due to a lack of real-world experience, which creates a vicious cycle. With her Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project, Navyashree is willing to give opportunities for people looking to break into a certain technical field to work on real-world organisations projects. They start with micro-tasks, earn in crypto currency, get displayable badges verifying their contributions and skills gained, besides accessing mentorship and networking opportunities. At the same time, organisations will be assisted with framing their micro-tasks via futures thinking tools.

Olga Shaeva
Education Award 2022
Russian FederationOlga and Nikolay believe that schools' curriculums are not currently fully supporting their students' development for the world they will live in as adults. To tackle such challenge, they will develop a knowledge graph and handbook to be incorporated into schools' curriculum and increase students' futures literacy. Students will be taught to spot signals of change in various domains, identify emerging futures and generate insights for scenario building. Olga and Nikolay hope students will be enabled to apply futures thinking to actively create their personal and professional strategies and become agents of their own lives.

Salime Goharinezhad, Hanieh Neshastesaz, Fereshteh Khaleghi and Amirhossein Naghipour from PH4PF
Middle East Award 2022
Iran, Islamic Republic ofSalime's Planetary Health for Planetary Futures is a student-led initiative that brings together medical sciences students from all over Iran who are passionate about planetary health and planetary futures. She will train this next generation of health workers in foresight and futures thinking so they can anticipate, respond to, and address global health challenges in such a way that they simultaneously provide people with sustainable health care services and promote the planet's wellbeing. As a result, Salime envisions health professionals minimising the negative health care footprint on the climate, safeguarding the well-being of the planet, and promoting a culture of hope through planetary consciousness.

Sangam Paudel
Environment Award 2022
NepalSangam strongly believes that the relationships and mindsets that people have around nature influence the kind of futures that we move towards. He will carry out a storytelling project, with stories of individuals and communities living in different scenarios of 2030/2040 Singapore. Each scenario will be informed by a specific mindset and relationship established with nature. His objective is to raise awareness on how various possible futures can be created based on the different ways we interact with nature and initiate important conversations that lead to environmental action.

Tonny Michael Wamboga, Anne Elfi Quednau, Josephine Nakiyimba, Mackline Kobusingye and Kisitu Aloysious Musanyusa from Jangu International
Team Award 2022
UgandaTonny and his team at Jangu International developed a self-organised, self-governed, cost-effective, and “freesponsible” learning space, where disadvantaged youth unleash their potential for positive change as social entrepreneurs. They provide a pathway, foresight tools, and the mindset for participants to shape a vision for their future and create new solutions in the form of social and environmental enterprises. As many of the local areas around the NGO are not yet familiar with the digital world, they are now seeking to develop an ICT centre and expand its support to tech-based social enterprises.

Xiomara Acevedo Navarro
South America Award 2022
ColombiaBarranquilla+20 is a youth-led organisation dedicated to educate and empower children and youth, so they can be the advocates for a greener future, lead climate and biodiversity actions, and secure the planet's natural heritage to the next generations. Xiomara, Barranquilla+20's founder, focuses her efforts particularly in educating historically marginalised communities and civil society organisations, and uses foresight as part of her training methodologies. Her vision is to support cities and residential areas to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, protect their biodiversity and preserve their waters in order to achieve climate and social justice, intergenerational equity, and rescue traditional knowledge across regions in Colombia.
Walkabout Prizes

Siddhi Patil
Winner, 2022
India"What would technology look like if it was developed in smaller places like Melghat instead of Silicon Valley?". This is the question that inspired Siddhi to co-create an accessible speculative design process with farmers from the tribal community of Korku, in the region of Melghat, India. Together, they have created prototypes of alternative agricultural futures. Siddhi now wants to offer a storytelling platform for farmers to participate in future scenarios building and share their dreams, hopes, desires, and needs related to the use of emerging farming technologies. Such narratives will then not only support them to create their own solutions and interventions, but also inform action plans and investment of NGOs, development agencies, governments and international funders in the region.

Yuri Calleo
Winner, 2022
ItalyWhenever there is great uncertainty about the future, experts tend to opt for the use of different approaches. A widely used is the Delphi-based Scenarios (DBS) development process, a creative process that uses the expertise of a panel, and iterative rounds to obtain experts' opinions convergence. The downside of it is that it is very time-consuming. Yuri developed the "Real-Time Geo-Spatial Consensus System" platform to increase, via Real-Time Spatial Delphi, the method's efficiency in the development of complex future scenarios. The open-source platform will be first used with academic experts, governments, and citizens to develop climate change spatial scenarios in some European coastal areas in 2050 and 2100. Results will inform climate policy development.
Young Voices

Nataly and Stephanie, Peru
First place winner, Young Voices
Yura Warm" proposes the manufacture of feminine sanitary pads with a bioplastic based on banana peel. Not only the pads are degradable in 2 to 3 months, but the project also promotes a circular economy by remunerating farmers fairly for the peels that would, otherwise, be discarded.

Rahmina, Kenya
Runner up, Young Voices
Rahmina's project is using water hyacinth to make environmentally friendly products such as cards, bags, papers, bookmarks, table coasters, furniture, wristbands, and hairbands. This is one of the main contributions towards the restoration of Lake Victoria, in Kenya.

Tia, Pakistan
Runner up, Young Voices
This Is Us' is an organisation founded by Tia in 2019. It aims to establish confidence in girls from a young age through honing leadership skills and community building. To empower, reclaim, and sustain is the organisation's motto. "With each step we take as young voices, we aim to impact the world's citizens to the fullest, keeping in mind our role in this world", says Tia.

Zahwah, Pakistan
Runner up, Young Voices
Journalism for Kids is the first of its kind in the country. Its main purpose is to help shape kids’ ideas, sharpen their perceptions and provide them with a safe yet stimulating platform where they can express themselves. Kids are being empowered to speak up, talk about and discuss their concerns and be the voice of the voiceless children. It addresses the issues that children face in daily life, like bullying and cyber security, and look for solutions.
Our 2022 Judges




















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