Co-creatingFuture

Ubuntu.Lab is an applied online-offline learning program for change-makers, emerging and established leaders and innovators across Africa.

ubuntu lab icon with wording

What is Ubuntu.Lab?

Ubuntu.Lab, which is the regional expression of the Presencing Institute's u-school, catalyses a dynamic community of African change makers committed to co-creating solutions to the continent’s most urgent social, economic, and environmental challenges.

How did it start?

The Ubuntu philosophy is based on the interconnectedness not only of human beings — “I am because you are” — but also on our interdependency with nature’s elements (both living and inanimate), and the intertwining between past, present and future. Ubuntu is a life force that has shaped African culture for centuries past. How can it be brought back, revived and used as an inspiring force to reshape Africa’s future?

What does that look like on a societal level? How can it impact health, education, governance, leadership? And how can the Ubuntu.Lab example more globally inspire transnational societal renewal and transformation in the 21st century and beyond?

Ubuntu.Lab is the budding actualisation of a visionary dream: that of stirring Africa towards a journey of self-awakening and empowerment, at the confluence of individual possibility, collective opportunity and historical timeliness. Originally the brainchild of Aggie and Martin Kalungu-Banda, two Africans from Zambia “living in diaspora”, Ubuntu.Lab has taken the online-offline, large-scale, low-cost learning model developed by the Presencing Institute team of practitioners, and fine-tuned it to the unique peculiarities of its African context, in collaboration with Julie Arts who brings immense experience in online-offline learning and facilitation.