Building Roads to Resilience
A speculative fiction chapter written in collaboration, about what it looks like when communities are trusted to lead their own futures.
By - Virkein Dhar & Mabala Nyalugwe
The Project
This piece began, like the best collaborations do, with a question that neither of us could answer alone: what does it actually take to seed resilient futures within communities?Mabala Nyalugwe brings lived expertise from humanitarian fieldwork - running human-centred design projects with international agencies across the Republic of Congo and Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health. I come at it from a different angle: as a storyteller who uses multiple mediums to ask what imagination can do in the service of more equitable processes.Together, we contributed a chapter to an anthology exploring speculative futures and community design. The brief asked us to produce something in four parts: an introduction to our process, a fiction narrative, an artefact (in our case a business plan), and individual reflections. What emerged was a close conversation about two pressure points in any project cycle - the entry and the exit. How do you come into a community? And what happens when you leave?"What we did for many years in the past was to find standardized solutions to problems that evolve constantly. I've always believed that my support should be of the nature that lets the community build for themselves."
We chose a post-crisis research project as our anchor: a fictional scenario set in 2031, one year after a new viral strain begins to spread, drawing forward the unresolved threads of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on Burkina Faso. The story follows Amara — a young independent researcher — and her aunt Esi, a Ghanaian-British designer who runs a human-centred design firm called Kwami Designs. What Esi plants over years of careful, trust-building work is what Amara carries forward on her own. That handoff, and what makes it possible, is what the chapter is about.
Excerpt from the narrative
Amara is a young researcher with a deep interest in the history of feminist movements and is a pop music enthusiast. After completing her Bachelor’s Degree in humanitarian and development studies, she works as an independent field researcher in Burkina Faso, running projects with Kwami Designs - a Ghanian design firm that has been working with human centered design approaches in Sub-Saharan Africa. Amara is also part of the core team at Youth Unite - a youth volunteer organisation located within the national hospital in Burkina Faso, who host information sessions with secondary school and university students on sexual and reproductive health.The founding lead at Kwami, happens to be Amara’s maternal aunt- Esi Williams, a Ghanian native who was adopted as a 5 year old and grew up in London. She calls herself a tempered radicalist, someone who always saw a little differently from the norm. However, instead of confrontation she prefers to work on constructive change through small but firm actions that can shift perspectives towards how development initiatives should be implemented in the region. Amara is deeply inspired by Esi’s drive and her extraordinary ability to pull people together to collectively build more localized and culturally relevant solutions with the communities she works with.
THE SUNDAY MEETING
It's 2031. In Burkina Faso, at least twenty confirmed cases of the X9 viral strain have been reported in the capital. The virus is more contagious than COVID-19 and particularly targets young people. The government is expected to announce restrictions soon.
Amara, a field researcher, youth advocate, and former trainee of Kwami Designs , calls her aunt Esi in London.
Amara : "Aunty, it looks like we're going to be having another lockdown coming up soon. I'm a bit worried about what's going to happen in the community."
Esi : "You should meet up with Youth Unite and plan for what might be needed in case of another series of lockdowns. There is also a health emergency fund that hospitals can now apply for."
Amara had continued the Sunday community meetings long after Kwami's formal project ended. She'd been hiring no one — just showing up, facilitating, holding space. Girls who'd first come for reproductive health information had become regulars. A circle of trust had grown in the group.When she put out the agenda for the upcoming Sunday meeting and asked members to invite others who might want to plan for possible lockdowns, she expected perhaps fifteen or twenty people. When she walked toward the community centre that Sunday, she saw far more: shopkeepers, pharmacists, the full UMA app team, former Youth Unite mobilisers, parents. A whole neighbourhood's informal infrastructure had turned up.The meeting broke organically into working groups. While Patience — now a young entrepreneur working on UMA, a city-government supply chain app — facilitated discussion on supply chain disruptions caused by a damaged telecom tower, Amara led a group of thirty young women to discuss health concerns. It was there that Afua, one of the older girls, raised menstrual cups — a topic that had failed in workshops before.This time, the conversation was different. Afua's cousin in America had sent her animated videos showing how to use them, made by girls her own age. The group decided to make their own. Volunteers signed up. A nurse from the local hospital joined. Within a month, informal training sessions on contraception were running, and the local hospital reported a marked increase in young women seeking information and services. Some girls who had been learning to sew had started making reusable pads to sell within the community.
Amara : In our last project, I remember you insisted on not just building solutions, but also setting the questions by the participants. This changed the dynamic of our consultations. Your training gave me the confidence to continue these conversations even after the project finished.
Esi : I would believe resilience is just that. What we did for many years in the past was to find standardised solutions to problems that evolve constantly. I've always believed that my support should be of the nature that lets the community build for themselves.
That evening, Amara called Esi, excited. She asked whether there might be a fund they could apply for — to make more videos, expand to digital literacy for elders, health, sanitation. Could they write a proposal together?What emerged from that call was a business plan for FASCON - a peer-led creator company focused on women's health content in Africa. Not a grant-dependent NGO offshoot, but a seed-funded, mentored, revenue-generating media company run by the same young women who made the videos. Community-led, community-owned, and designed to outlast every project cycle that seeded it.
Why we made this
The Plausible Made Possible
The artefact we chose to include in the chapter was a business plan - a lean canvas for FASCON, which felt more honest than a policy recommendation or an abstract framework. Business plans are made by people who intend to do something. They require belief in the community's capacity to act, not just to receive.The chapter sits within a broader anthology imagining alternative structures for humanitarian and development work. Our intervention was deliberately small in scale and insistent on plausibility. We weren't interested in utopia. We were interested in the first step — the kind of step that's already being taken somewhere, by someone, with inadequate support.The questions we kept returning to: What are the incentive structures baked into the projectised system that make self-reliance difficult? What would it look like if the exit of a project was designed as carefully as the entry? And who, specifically, gets trained and certified and trusted with continuity?Amara is our answer — fictional, yes, but built entirely from real patterns Mabala has witnessed in the field. She is the knowledge that stays behind when the funding ends.
Reflections from the Authors
Virkein Dhar
Strategist, storyteller & design thinker
As someone who has always been at an arm's length from core humanitarian aid and action, I've been witness to conversations and projects that have intended to support communities towards resilience but have instead made them reliant on external sources of support — limited, and incentivised towards promoting a cycle of dependence.My intention with this piece was to explore not an idealised future, but one that is plausible — and thus actionable. We're well aware that change takes time, but what could be the first steps has been at the centre of every conversation between me and Mabala. We've identified the community to lead this change. I see resilience as an outcome of building self-reliant structures of support. The reach of social media, combined with support for grassroots entrepreneurship, has produced evidence of communities finding their own solutions.Futures built on the perspectives of witnessing rather than experiencing can be narrow in their scope of possibility and often lose their essence in interpretation. Our provocations are geared towards near futures that acknowledge the lived experience of communities, and the impact they could make with assistance that encourages independent thinking. Amara is representative of the community leading change. The artefact we chose — a business plan written by young peers — is a provocation for the plausible made possible.
Mabala Nyalugwe
Humanitarian researcher & human-centred design practitioner
With all the projects that I have worked on with different organisations and communities, there always remains the question of what next? Sometimes the client will ask for help implementing whatever interventions we have designed, but we have no idea what long-lasting changes will happen once our work with them is done.Along with my community work, I have worked with young, bright individuals who are determined to bring change within their communities. It is thus really important that this story of resilience has been centred around Amara and what she has learned and been able to do. True resilience is only achieved when individuals within the community have the capacity to bring change themselves. In Amara's case, we not only see her set up a task force to help girls and young women get access to sexual and reproductive services — we see her pass down this knowledge to others. All that she learned with her aunt's organisation is now living within the community.Re-imagining this through Amara gives us a blueprint for how this can work in the real world. What also happens to the individuals we work with? Not all research assistants are as educated as Amara, but they can be trained and receive certifications in research or design thinking. This can enable them to carry out this work, or make them employable for projects with other organisations. All of this continues to build the community's capacity to identify and create its own solutions.
This piece was written as a chapter in a collaborative anthology on speculative futures and community design. (that is yet to be published)