The African Foresight Academy (AFA) brings together foresight thinkers and practitioners to foster collaboration. We are a rallying point, a hub, and a go to place (virtual & physical) for varying agricultural foresight clusters of activities and capacity development in Africa. Through our activities, we engage with foresight practitioners using on-line and offline strategies. The establishment of the Africa Foresight Academy (AFA) is predicated on the need to foster forward-thinking on how innovation and knowledge can best help surmount the diverse challenges facing Africa, to ensure that agricultural research and innovation are more responsive to future agri-food systems and related development needs. The CAADP ex-Pillar IV institutions-CAADP XP4 (i.e AFAAS, ASARECA, CCARDESA, CORAF and FARA) support the activities of AFA through: 

• Sensitizing stakeholders about the relevance of foresight
• Facilitating the development of competencies in conducting foresight and interpretation of foresight results
• Offering technical assistance to enable regional and national organizations to participate in foresight initiatives and 
• Applying results from past /ongoing foresight and documenting and sharing experiences in foresight. 

The vision and conversations to design and develop Africa Foresight Academy was initiated by FARA during the 2012 meeting in Dublin. This was followed by an inception workshop held at FARA HQ at Accra Ghana in which a decision was made to specifically focus on the design of the African Foresight Academy to align with the operationalization of the Science Agenda for African Agriculture (S3A). FARA had completed a number of commissioned studies on profiling of the Foresight environment in Africa covering definitional, conceptual, & existing capacity for foresight programming on the continent in respect to Agricultural Development.

In addition, foresight activities from around the world were assessed, design of the academy determined, and pathways to operationalization and implementation of the Science Agenda for African Agriculture identified.