 | Research project |
Futures Research
| Status : | Current |
| Project leader : |
Karuri, J.W. (Ms Geci) |
| Other team members : |
Munthree, C. (Ms Crystal) Hemson, C.D.L. (Dr David) Govender, Koshen (Ms K.) |
| Research output(s) : |
Karuri-Sebina, G., Hemson, D., Munthree, C. & O'Donovan, M. (2008) Future of South Africa state of the future index SA-SOFI. (Paper presented at a Reference Panel Meeting, 8 April). |
Project summary
<p align'"justify>Futures research at the HSRC has been initiated in the SA-SOFI project and through a parallel set of explorations around the broader research agenda.
<p align'"justify>This base project is establishing a first-in-Africa competence in developing State of the Future Indices (SOFIs), with a South Africa SOFI which is designed to be a regular complement to the high profile annual State of the Nation reports.
<p align'"justify>The SOFI is a measure of the 10-year outlook for the future. It is constructed with a set of key variables and forecasts that, in the aggregate, depict whether the future promises to be better or worse. The SOFI is intended to show the directions and intensity of change in the outlook and to identify the factors responsible.
Full description
<p align'"justify>Futures research at the HSRC has been initiated in the SA-SOFI project and through a parallel set of explorations around the broader research agenda.
<p align'"justify>
This base project is establishing a first-in-Africa competence in developing State of the Future Indices (SOFIs), with a South Africa SOFI which is designed to be a regular complement to the high profile annual State of the Nation reports.
<p align'"justify>
The SOFI is a measure of the 10-year outlook for the future. It is constructed with a set of key variables and forecasts that, in the aggregate, depict whether the future promises to be better or worse. The SOFI is intended to show the directions and intensity of change in the outlook and to identify the factors responsible.
<p align'"justify>
The purpose of developing national SOFIs is to:
- Help establish priorities for policy and investment decisions intended to improve a country as a whole based on objective, quantifiable evidence of trends.
- Explore the effects of proposed policies on a nominal SOFI. The SOFI approach provides a mechanism for studying the relationships among the items in a system ? how making a single change ripples throughout a system, in other words, creating some positive and intended consequence as well unintended results.
- Compare performance of different countries. SOFI can be applied to individual countries or groups, and can then be used to compare their future outlook to others as well as to the world as a whole.
- Address a problem whose variations are not adequately reflected in a global SOFI.