I have been following online the Global Conscious Food System Summit currently happening in Bhutan and will write more about it later, probably next week. But for now I just want to quote one of the speakers today, Mr John Fullerton, Founder of Capital Institute. He said: "Economy is not a machine to be optimised or controlled but it needs to be seen, managed and governed as if it were a living organism, made up of living systems called human beings". I love this reframing. It moves the economy away from being a cold, emotionless machine optimised for growth and serving only a few, and reimagining it as a living organism: impermanent, always changing, and made up of human beings. But being alive doesn't automatically make something fair. A living system can still be governed to serve the few. That's the real shift I believe Fullerton is pointing to: not just what the economy is, but how it is governed. Right now, too many of us live as fearful, exhausted servants to the economy. It should be the other way around: an economy governed to serve humans, with people and all living beings at its center. Curious to hear what you think!

Food systems globally won’t change because of another panel on “sustainability.” They’ll change when the world stops treating farmers, land and community as mere line items. That’s the premise behind the Global Conscious Food Systems Summit, organised by Conscious Food Systems Alliance, happening in Bhutan from 1–4 September. And you don’t need a plane ticket to be part of it! Alongside the livestream, five regional online gatherings will run daily during the summit, in partnership with Alef Trust : Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America. Real conversations, in your own time zone, in English, French or Spanish. I’ll be holding space as Sense Maker for the Africa gathering. This means my job is to actually listen, not perform listening, and carry what’s real in our region back into the room in Bhutan and into the Conscious Food Systems Alliance. If you work in food, farming, policy or business anywhere in Africa and you’re tired of talking about change without making any, this is your chance to say what you’re seeing, name what your region actually needs, and have it land somewhere real. Register here: https://consciousfoodsystems.org/online-participation/

Three weeks ago I wrote about data and statistics; the cold architecture of global inequality. Two weeks ago I wrote about imagination, whether we can understand a person we’ve never met, and what kind of imagination actually gets us closer to someone else’s reality. Last weekend the course “The World as a Village of 100 People” moved into its third chapter: Transformation. **Now that we understand and now that we’ve imagined, how do we act without reproducing the very dynamics we’re trying to dismantle?** It is, I’ve come to believe, the hardest question of the three. In our village of 100 people, one of the villagers stopped me in my tracks this past weekend. She is a young woman, aged between 20 and 24. She lives in the deepest poverty: one of 68 people who together control just 3% of the village’s wealth. She has no housing, no education, no water, no sanitation, no internet. She has electricity. That is all. When asked what she most wanted, she didn’t ask for a donation. She didn’t ask for a handout. She said: "Don’t just help me. Make sure no other person can ever land in my position". She was asking for systemic change. She was asking us to go to the root cause. Not treat the symptom, not make ourselves feel better with a gesture, but fix the conditions that made her situation possible in the first place. It is a completely different ask. And most of our systems (aid, development, philanthropy) are not designed to deliver it. This is not a new problem. It is an old one, repeating itself with remarkable consistency across generations of well-meaning effort. A striking example is PlayPumps International, a project that installed merry-go-round water pumps in rural African communities, designed so that children playing would simultaneously pump clean water. It was ingenious, it was photogenic, and it attracted significant funding. And it failed because nobody adequately consulted the communities who would use them. The pumps were harder to operate than hand pumps, broke down without accessible spare parts, and placed an unexpected burden on women and children to keep them running. A solution designed without asking the people it was designed for.

The short course “The World as a Village of 100 People” is structured around four weekends each with their own theme. Last time I wrote about week one - Orientation. We looked at and discussed the data, the statistics, the cold architecture of global inequality. This week we moved into something harder to measure: Imagination. CAN WE UNDERSTAND A PERSON WE NEVER MET? It sounds like such a simple question, but it isn’t. Most of us move through life in circles of sameness. We build relationships with people who share our education level, our income bracket, our ethnicity, our worldview. Even when we think we’re being open, the algorithms of social media are quietly doing the opposite. They push us deeper into our own corner, reinforcing what we already believe, showing us more of what we already see. The concept of ubuntu — I am because we are — tells us that we are incomplete without the other. A person is a person through other people. But which people? And how do we reach the ones we never encounter? Because even our imagination has its limits. It is shaped by what we have lived, what we have read, what we have been allowed to see. We don’t imagine freely, we imagine from somewhere. And that somewhere is always, unavoidably, ourselves. This is where the course introduced an idea that stayed with me long after the session ended. Most non-fiction is written in first or third person. "I experienced this." "She lived through that." The reader remains at a safe distance. Moved, perhaps, but separate. Second person is much rarer, and for good reason: it is uncomfortable. “You wake up before dawn.” “You fold a torn page carefully into the seam of your pants because you have no bag, no shelf, no box of your own.” Suddenly there is no distance. The grammar has placed you inside someone else’s life before you decided whether you were ready to go there. It doesn’t ask permission. It just takes you. But here is the question that unsettled me: is that understanding, or is it a literary trick? The immersion feels real. The empathy feels genuine. And yet, circumstances haven’t changed. Only the reader’s comfort has.

Thought this would be of interest to share as applications are currently open for a United World College (UWC)-endorsed online short course “The World as a Village of 100 People.” This online course invites participants to explore global inequality, identity, interdependence, and citizenship through an immersive simulation-based learning experience. Using the imaginative framework of a “village of 100 people,” participants will examine how global systems shape everyday life and how communities make decisions about their shared future. Through dialogue, role-based learning, and a structured Citizen Assembly, participants will practice empathy, ethical representation, systems thinking, and collaborative decision-making. The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI) is an education and civic learning initiative that uses human geography, dialogue, and systems thinking to help young people and communities better understand global interdependence, inequality, and planetary futures. The GIEI designs learning experiences and research projects that cultivate imagination, critical thinking, and collective agency around global challenges. If anyone does sign up it would be fabulous to share your learning back here with the community ☺️