UNAIDS Logo


  Scenarios Home
  About the Project
  Aims and Objectives
  Phases of the Project
  Scenario Building
  Project Initiating Partners
  Project Donors
  Direction and Management
  Acknowledgements
  FAQ
  Project Resources
  Participants
  Project Team
  Research and Presentation Resources
  Orientation Workshop
  Interviews
  Workshop Report
  Image Gallery
  Scenario Building Workshop
  Workshop Report
  Post-Workshop Interviews
  Affirmation Workshop
  Commentary Field
 
AIDS in Africa, Scenarios for the future Skip to main content Skip to Left toolbar Skip to Bottom toobar Skip to highlights section, only available on the home page
English | Français

Home >> About the Project >> Scenario Building

 
  Aids logo

Scenario Building



The project is using a scenario-based engagement process to focus on the impact of, and response to, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, in relation to social development, poverty reduction, economic growth and political stability among others. Using a 20-year time frame, it will focus on key questions concerning the epidemic’s impact. It will ask, for example, how AIDS will affect different generations over the next 20 years, including the generation already infected or affected; the generation that is about to become sexually active; and the new generation of those being born now (which will include large numbers of children orphaned by AIDS).

The project aims to bring together divergent views and perspectives to create an informed and shared understanding of the issues involved and to help activate a broad-based response from all segments of society, with regard to care, support, treatment and prevention, and to overcome stigma and discrimination against people infected with HIV.

What are Scenarios?

A scenario is a story that describes a possible future. It identifies some significant events, the main actors and their motivations, and it conveys how the world functions. Building and using scenarios can help people explore what the future might look like and the likely challenges of living in it.

Decision makers can use scenarios to think about the uncertain aspects of the future that most worry them – or to discover the aspects about which they should be concerned – and to explore the ways these might unfold. Because there is no single answer to such enquiries, scenario builders create sets of scenarios. These scenarios all address the same important questions and all include those aspects of the future that are likely to persist (that is, the predetermined elements), but each one describes a different way in which the uncertain aspects of the future could play out.

Scenarios are based on intuition, but crafted as analytical structures. They are written as stories that make potential futures seem vivid and compelling. They do not provide a consensus view of the future, nor are they predictions: they may describe a context and how it may change, but they do not describe the implications of the scenarios for potential users nor dictate how they must respond.

Scenarios are intended to form a basis for strategic conversation – they are a method for considering potential implications of and possible responses to different events. They provide their users with a common language and concepts for thinking and talking about current events, and a shared basis for exploring future uncertainties and making more successful decisions. (Scenarios: An Explorer’s Guide, Global Business Environment, Shell International, Copyright 2003).

Scenarios have been used by a wide variety of institutions to provide a bridge that links the uncertainties that we hold about the future to the decisions we must make today. For example, scenarios were used by a diverse group of stakeholders to explore the future of South Africa when the country was in transition in the early 1990s.

Scenarios are rigorous stories about the future, embodying a wide variety of ideas and integrating them in a way that is communicable and useful. The process places a strong emphasis on the joint definition of a ‘problematique’ - a shared perception of issues that need to be addressed - and on the synthesis of ideas, rather than just extended and deeper analysis.

Good synthesis requires people who are both well informed and curious, along with a preparedness to allow new ideas to be explored. Building scenarios involves honouring difference rather than achieving a consensus which implies putting different frames of references to one side. The process will develop two or three scenarios that challenge us collectively, are plausible and are consequential for the development of policies and strategies for fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

 
 
UNAIDS Home | Site Map | Contact Us | Accessibility Features