Dr Kenneth Nsah, popularly known as Nsah Mala, has been accepted into a highly competitive international fellowship in foresight and futures thinking called the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner (NGFP) Fellowship administered by the School of International Futures (SOIF) in the United Kingdom (UK). The announcement was made recently by NGFP and SOIF.
Nsah Mala is one of 26 NGFP Fellows for 2023 selected from a highly competitive pool of 364 applicants from across the globe. And Dr Nsah further emerged as one of only TWO JUDGES’ CHOICES among the 26 NGFP Fellows for 2023 as the distinguished international panel of judges found his application to be outstanding. Out of the 26 new global fellows, four come from Africa, including Dr Kenneth Nsah from Cameroon and other fellows from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Uganda.
Over the next 12 months, NGFP will offer mentorship support, foresight training and capacity building, access to funding opportunities, connection with policy makers, experts and futurists, and participation in strategic events as benefits to the new cohort of 26 NGFP Fellows.
In his NGFP project, Nsah Mala will be working with selected youth from the Congo Basin countries to craft alternative narratives of the future that can lead to more concrete climate action and efforts to protect biodiversity. The project will combine creative writing and storytelling skills with tools and methods from foresight and futures thinking to produce alternative future narratives about the Congo Basin which covers six countries in central Africa, including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa (DRC), Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.
The project will build on Dr Nsah’s multifaceted skills, talents and fields of expertise/interest. The native of Mbesa Fondom in the Northwest Region of Cameroon is a poet, writer, children’s author, communications specialist, journalist, futurist and foresight practitioner, scholar and interdisciplinary researcher. His PhD thesis won the 2022 Prix de thèses francophones en Prospective (Prize for Francophone Theses in Foresight and Futures) from Fondation 2100 (France) and Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF).
Dr Nsah holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Environmental Humanities from Aarhus University and has carried out research, lectured and worked for Aarhus University (Denmark), Radboud University (Netherlands) and Université de Lille (France), among other institutions and organisations. Operating in English and French, Nsah Mala is the author or editor of numerous poetry collections and anthologies, children’s picture books, short stories and essays, journalistic articles, peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has won many prizes for his impactful and wide-ranging work in Cameroon, Denmark, France, UK and elsewhere.
