Our previous entry about the scenario scanning process we carried out with all of our colleagues in the UNDP Peru Country Office (CO) described in detail the reasoning behind why the three members of the Accelerator Lab chose to do this so soon after joining UNDP for one of the most important planning processes: Writing the Country Programme Document (CPD).

The CPD, which will guide the organization’s work for the next five years, it’s being written during a very complex context due to COVID-19’s impact on the likelihood of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and a change in administration.

Applying futures thinking does not require an uncertain context, but its methodologies definitely help us make sense of unstructured and apparently messy information. This is why the Lab launched a strategic foresight exercise through horizon scanning with the goal of contributing to the CPD writing process as well as building a “compass” to support all of the teams in their work for the next five years. This post is all about our initial results: What signals we saw, which trends we found, and the scenarios we built.

Weaving the signals

As described earlier, we planned two weeks for signal collection and parallel informal Q&A sessions to allow some time for our colleagues to find and record signals as part of their daily lives, either during their working hours, reading online articles and news, or even observing their children. The CO team had two options to record the signals we saw: We could fill out a very simple online form prepared by the Lab or we could add them directly onto a Mural board during the two workshops that took place after the two initial weeks were over. The initial results were over 200 signals collected and translated into seven trends:

●      Digital life: Underscores all other trends as the pandemic evidenced how the digital gap is the new economic and social gap. Also, having a cell phone or wifi access isn’t enough without digital skills. Who is being left even further behind? How long will it take to catch up?

●      New identities: Who we are is being redefined by increased access (although still limited) to the Internet as well as the return to their rural hometowns of younger Peruvians who traveled to urban centers for educational and job opportunities that were cut short due to the pandemic. Political campaigns going digital due to health risks are reinforcing and radicalizing identities. Is the opposition to something the only way to define our identities nowadays?

●      New social organizations: Without a clear hierarchy, flexible, temporary and crowdsourced, these organizations are baffling their traditional counterparts as they self-organize to address social and political issues while connecting with similar organizations all around the world. If they’re here to stay, how can we leverage their adaptability and focus on those left behind while also involving them in conversations about lasting solutions?

●      Prioritize mental health: Privileged Peruvians can’t decide whether they work at home or if they live at work; the vulnerable ones can’t even think about mental health if the fragile structures surrounding them are crumbling. How will this impact the future of society, the economy and politics?

●      Politics of mistrust: Peru is among the least trusting countries in the region according to Latinobarometro, and for good reason given the corruption scandals that have shaken up the country in the last decades. However, the latter generations of Peruvians have only known mistrust in the political system and deception from their authorities (and almost half a million of them voted for the first time in 2021). What does this spell for the future of democracy?

●      Sustainability out of necessity: In the early days of the pandemic, we saw clear skies and clean oceans and marveled at the planet’s ability to renew itself. If the pandemic was a warning sign, will we recommit to new sustainable ways once the crisis is over and the country has to make up for the lost GDP?

●      New post-pandemic livelihoods: Just because someone sells online, it doesn’t mean it’s a digital business. Decentralized and internet-based but still informal and designed for survival, do they spell the beginning of a new Peruvian digital economy or will they disappear once mobility restrictions are lifted?

These trends are not exclusive to Peru, but the way they impact and shape the context in which UNDP operates and how the organization evaluates its results is certainly country specific. This is why it was important to kickstart the conversation on how prepared the Peru CO is to face these trends and what challenges and opportunities we might find for UNDP in the coming years. However, it was not possible to have this space for self-reflection outside of concrete situations that could help us sense the future, so we built scenarios that intersected our seven local trends plus the global trends identified by UNDP Headquarters as part of their 2022-2025 Strategic Plan (see attached). Why intersect these sets of trends? The local trends and the global trends create a feedback loop and we see important similarities between both sets, but more importantly, the Peru CO lives right in between that trend “sandwich”:

It takes (three) to tango: Building scenarios

As part of collective intelligence methodologies deployed for the CPD preparatory meetings, colleagues were invited to participate in a scenario building workshop where they could not only imagine how the future would look like (both positive and negative), but also discuss what could be areas of improvement for the country office. Each breakout room had a five-year time horizon and three trends to work with (two local trends and a global one), and any scenario would have to be related to UNDP’s work in the country.

The graph above is a visual representation that colleagues from all projects and programmes in the Peru CO used to brainstorm and draft scenarios first, and later act as devil’s advocate to identify gaps that lead to growth opportunities for our projects and processes. As a preview, here are two out of the five scenarios we built:

●      In 2026 most vulnerable Peruvians have not been able to overcome the impact of the pandemic, but improvements in living conditions have been led by women who organized in collectives and support networks despite the continuation of precarious employment conditions. Non-traditional educational solutions are surging and businesses attempt to solve the lack of specific skills through online education, which overshadows formal college education. Talent recruitment is decentralized at a national level but the digital gap (widened during the pandemic) deepens and becomes more evident.

●      In 2026 there is increased direct involvement by new actors in the debate on multilateral agreements through digital platforms, which also includes conservative groups that resist the expansion of rights. Some groups are left outside of the national and global conversation due to the digital gap despite the surge of new govtechs promoted by the government’s interest in channeling citizen demands and new identities.

We are currently working with the teams at our CO to adapt the learnings from this exercise to their specific ongoing and future projects taking into account the CPD being written and its expected results, and we will be sharing a completed report on signals, trends and scenarios in the next months. Please reach out to the Peru Accelerator Lab (acclab.pe@undp.org) if you’d like to discuss your own futures thinking work, learn more about our own, or just get in touch with us to share possible collaboration opportunities. Stay tuned!