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Future Africa hosted French Deputy Director for Global Affairs Jean-Sébastien Conty for a guest lecture exploring France’s contributions to addressing global challenges. The session highlighted international cooperation on climate action, health, food systems, and gender equality.

Sustainability science must shed inherited assumptions and embrace African-centred approaches grounded in justice, imagination, and relational thinking. This was the message from Future Africa’s recent transdisciplinary dialogue, where Prof Lesley Green and Prof Maano Ramutsindela called for a new language of science rooted in African thought.

Conservation is often viewed as a moral good, but speakers at a Future Africa panel revealed how its history in Africa is marked by dispossession, invisibility, and colonial violence. The discussion called for reparations that address intertwined ecological and human injustices.

Africa must develop its own answers to the climate crisis or risk deepening existing inequalities. This call to action emerged during a panel discussion on equitable and just climate actions hosted by Future Africa in partnership with IRD-CNRS-CIRAD joint office in Southern Africa.

Future Africa at the University of Pretoria (UP) welcomes its first artist-in-residence, Dr Nicola Grobler, whose work explores bats through the intersecting lenses of art, philosophy, science, and public engagement.

“Africa must confront not just what it lacks, but what it has.” This was the call from panellists at the closing plenary of Africa Week 2025, who challenged the continent to act with collective intent, draw on its strengths, and take ownership of its future on its own terms.

Africa’s food insecurity is not just a development challenge — it’s a global security issue. That was the message from panellists at Africa Week 2025, who highlighted the links between hunger, conflict, climate change and governance failures, and called for integrated, long-term responses.

Africa needs to fund its own research and development or risk being left behind by a rapidly shifting global order. That was the hard-hitting message on the second day of Africa Week 2025, currently underway at Future Africa, the University of Pretoria’s (UP) pan-African platform for collaborative research.