Africa & Asia Webinar

Introduction: A Futurist Questioning Her Own Assumptions

Charlotte Kemp opens not with authority but with candour, admitting that her expertise on this topic is rooted largely in being born and raised in Africa, and that part of this webinar is about confronting the biases she herself carries. She and her husband Richard are living in Kuala Lumpur at the time of the recording, deliberately using the experience to expand their thinking and challenge the Western-centric worldview that dominates much of the futures and speaking industries.

Demographics: The Numbers That Should Change How We See the World

One of the webinar’s most striking sections centres on population data from populationpyramid.net. In the span of Charlotte’s lifetime, roughly five decades, the world’s population has more than doubled. Africa’s population has grown from 365 million to 1.5 billion in the same period. Meanwhile, Asia’s population growth is slowing considerably, producing a noticeably older demographic profile. The contrast matters enormously: Africa has a young, growing population, while Asia faces an ageing one with fewer young people entering the workforce to support it. This raises complex questions about education, employment, tax revenue, caregiving, and the kinds of technologies each region actually needs — automation, for example, may be a sensible solution in Asia but can be actively harmful in Africa, where it removes jobs rather than solving a labour shortage.

Confronting Western Bias — In Maps, Money, and Mindsets

Charlotte challenges the Mercator map projection, showing how it distorts the perceived size of continents and reinforces a Western-centric worldview. She shares a personal story: comfortable getting lost in London, but initially afraid to accept a speaking invitation in Nigeria — a reaction she traces directly to apartheid-era education that conditioned her to centre Europe and North America. She also presents data showing that more money flows *out* of Africa — through multinational profits, illegal resource extraction, and loan repayments — than flows in as aid, making the familiar narrative of African poverty not just incomplete but misleading.

Innovation Under Constraint vs. Abundance

Rather than framing Africa and Asia in competition or as opposites, Charlotte reframes the comparison using the language of *constraint* and *abundance*. Africa innovates under constraint — developing solutions like M-Pesa (mobile financial services that bypassed the need for banks), drone medical deliveries, and off-grid energy — while Asia, operating with greater infrastructure and technology abundance, focuses on scale, optimisation, and super-apps. The key insight is that neither context is superior; they generate different innovation questions. Under constraint: *who is being excluded, and how do we build a better system?* Under abundance: *how do we scale, and where are our redundancies?*

Futures Questions to Sit With

Charlotte closes with three questions she leaves for participants and clients alike: What demographic assumptions are we making that may not hold? Where are we innovating from comfort rather than necessity? And who are we not yet in conversation with — but should be? These questions form the backbone of her broader work helping individuals and organisations develop what she calls “thinking fit for the future.”

The Bigger Picture

Throughout the Q&A, participants from Asia, Europe, and Africa reflect on the shared frustration of seeing thought leadership reflexively revert to Western sources, even in organisations trying to do better. Charlotte’s webinar is a call not just to notice that bias, but to actively work against it — and to recognise the extraordinary, underacknowledged potential sitting across Africa and Asia.