Participants were among others Judith Helfmann of the Afrika-Verein (Africa Association) run by German businesses, Dr. Julia Leininger head of the “Governance, Statehood and Safety” Department of the German Institute for development policy, Fritz Grobien (Immediate past president of the Bremen Cotton Exchange) and Hanna Rammig of the ScMI AG. The ScMI AG served as a future expert during the panel discussion in order to introduce the study entitled “Scenarios for the future of Africa 2030”. While most of the other discussion partners were accepted experts on Africa and African issues, Hanna Rammig approached the issue of Africa’s future and development opportunities from the scenario perspective. “With our scenarios we illustrate different development directions Africa could take in the future. However, we do not consider any probabilities in the scenario creation process but rather logical consistencies of complex developments in economics, politics and society” emphasizes Hanna Rammig.

All discussion partners agree that the large and diverse continent should go its own way and developments need to be considered more differentiated because there simply is no single right way for an entire continent. This diversity is also reflected in the ScMI scenario study that includes an evaluation of each of the individual future scenarios. This assessment allows to assign countries to one of the future scenarios, or at least indicate a development direction. Above all, two students stress in the final discussion round that beyond discussing Africa's development purely from a abstract and scientific point of view, one should not forget the people living in the various Africa countries and the beauty of the entire countinent.