Think about a team of explorers setting off across unknown territory. They have a vision for what lies at the end of their exploration but not a sure path for getting there. The leader must send out scouts and the information the scouts return forms the basis for choosing the path. Lack of, or the wrong information, can lead to failure or disappointment on arrival. The journey to a future vision and, even, the vision itself may change, even as soon as the first step is taken. Planning for the future of a business or even a country has all of the issues of a physical journey and more. Often, there needs to be clarity of the vision, such as Rwanda’s Vision 2020. But, unlike, a physical journey, the number of variables is more complex and subject to change due to outside forces. Most strategic planning or foresight exercises for a country focus, principally on the future and not the journey. There are many consultants and materials to help define the current condition and the vision of the future. Yet it is the journey where the challenge lies. Rwanda knows this well, in its successful effort to build out its Internet or its current efforts around the proposed airport. Business and country strategic plans cannot be constructed, bound, and distributed like a book. The minute one step is taken on the journey, all is changed, maybe a little or a lot. While the effort to build the vision and plan for the journey may have been difficult, smart businesses and planners realise that the visions and paths need to be under regular review. For an under-resourced country, Rwanda is in an excellent position to respond to the path-critical exercise in foresight or strategic planning. Foresight professionals know that the key is to break traditional disciplinary boundaries. Yet, there are few institutions, including universities, even in the developed countries,that have committed foresight programmes that cut across academically created silos and include “futures studies” in their curriculum. The recent merger of the post-secondary campuses in Rwanda from health to agriculture and business to science presents a unique opportunity to carve out this critical, interdisciplinary, area. At the same time this will address another arena, management programmes, long identified as a critical weakness in business graduates. What makes it opportune is the recent focus on ICT-driven “Smart Rwanda”. Foresight planning such as environmental scanning use sophisticated, intelligent, search strategies. Future studies provide the tools and techniques to work across academic silos and provide critical skills needed to keep Rwanda at the cutting edge. For example, the nursing and agricultural campuses are jointly working across country borders to understand where pandemics can emerge. Faculty in medicine are linked with the international “One Health” programme that brings these interdisciplinary areas together. Needs under these programmes require strategic foresight and sophisticated ICT tools to identify “weak signals” as to what might be on the horizon. ICT/foresight are the “scouts” informing decision makers responsible for determining an evolving vision and the paths needed along the way. What is more important is that foresight and strategic planning knowledge need to be turned on the programmes and institution itself and the relationship between the university, the government of Rwanda and the public sectors. Rwanda is not alone in seeing that its university students are not prepared to function effectively in the workplace upon graduation. Globally, it is recognised that there is, effectively, a silo between the academic institutions and the world of work and that bridge needs to be built. This is a vision for the country where foresight skills can provide a creative and critical path. The vision is clear, but the journey needs to be articulated and impacts/implications assessed. Rwanda has one of the most extensive citizen-collaborative models in the world, one that starts in Kigali and drills down to the cell level, across the country. It is recognised that over 70 percent of the country is rural/agricultural-based, a community that has been slow to fully benefit from the expanding Internet. Rwanda is aware of, and has accessed ideas developed in 1999 by Sugata Mitra in his famous Hole-In-the-Wall experiment that showed that uneducated street children could rapidly utilize computers without training. Academic thinking immediately sees the formal education possibilities where, for Rwanda, it immediately points out that beyond the expansion of cell phones, computer access down to the cell is possible. This meets the two major goals of education to provide individuals, regardless of age or skills to increase their productivity in their work and to become active participation in civic life whether in Nyagatare or Kigali. With the rapidly decreasing cost of “smart” phones, it could even bring Kigali into the individual home, not just for children but also for the family. If one uses the very simple foresight tool, an “implications wheel”, along with the creation of an “impact matrix”, it immediately becomes apparent that while vision is important, the journey with good “scouting” is the often-neglected element. But it is critical for Rwanda to break the disciplinary silos within the University and between the University and the worlds of government and the private sector. Then foresight can inform the country.
