Pantopicon is co-hosting a pre-conference Foresight Lab with the International Training Centre of the ILO (ITCILO) and the African Union at eLearning Africa 2026 in Accra — the latest in an ongoing collaboration with ITCILO around futures of learning at the conference.

The lab brings together youth leaders, indigenous knowledge custodians, educators, technologists, anthropologists, policymakers and artists to explore one question: what becomes possible when futures of learning, youth and technology are authored from within African ways of knowing — built from them, rather than adapted to them?

The workshop is grounded in months of preparatory conversations with experts in indigenous knowledge systems. These exchanges shaped the building blocks the lab will run on — principles such as custodianship over ownership, the land knows and teaches, cyclical and ritual time, and indigenous languages carrying the future, not just the past — so they can serve as the spine of the future worlds participants will build, rather than as an accent on default ones.

Through worldbuilding and design fiction, participants will surface what AI tutors, mobile platforms, credentialing systems and learning environments could look like when shaped by these epistemic foundations. We’re grateful to ITCILO and the African Union for the continued partnership, and curious to see what emerges in Accra.