Podcast – Des Nouvelles de Demain

For its second series of episodes, the French language podcast series Des nouvelles de demain [News from Tomorrow] is offering fresh avenues of exploration. Five new themes structure the podcast collection: New languages of democracy, Sketches of the living, Intimacies, Living societies, and New economies, new territories. Like the first, this second series is available on all listening platforms.

Des nouvelles de demain, which has been available as a video series on eCampus AFD since 2021, was expanded to include a podcast version in July 2023. This initiative has been supported by the AFD Campus as part of  its commitment to deciphering our changing world. This collection of video and audio interviews is divided into two cycles. By listening to voices from here and elsewhere, we are invited to examine reality from a different perspective and to map out new horizons together.

The first series of podcasts was broadcast last summer. Each guest challenges our understanding of the world and awakens a desire for a different future.

To learn more, you can read (in French) : Des nouvelles de demain au format podcast

Cycle 2: a new episode every week

Episode 1 – Adam Dicko, Achille Mbembe, Rémy Rioux – reinventing development

Why is development so heavily criticised? Yet, despite this, why is it still alive and kicking? What significance can be given to this paradox? How can we invent a way forward? Adam Dicko, activist, Achille Mbembe, historian, philosopher and President of the Innovation Foundation for Democracy in Africa, and Rémy Rioux, Director General of the Agence Française de Développement, have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue about these issues for several years. Here, they talk about the difficulty of abandoning this structural concept and, at the same time, the urgent need to reinvent it and leave behind traditional approaches to providing aid in favour of a better understanding of local needs and expertise. It is a change that is both ambitious and urgent.

Listen to Episode 1 (in French)

Episode 2 – Blick Bassy : “Music makes me part of the world”

How can we rediscover our place in the web of life? How can we connect with our ancestors? Why does music allow us to feel part of the world? Why is it essential to reconstruct the memory of the victims of colonisation? Cameroonian artist Blick Blassy does a thousand different things in the service of beauty, life, and the protection of memory. Deploring the primacy of possession over being, the loss of spirituality, the destruction of the environment, and the sense of oblivion, he talks about how he is driven by his desire to restore the present and the strength given to him by his ancestors.

Listen to episode 2 (in French)

Episode 3 – Nadia Yala Kisukidi – Defending human lives for what they are

Why don’t some people have the right to exist? How can other forms of society be created? What progress has been made in decolonising knowledge? How can we nurture hope? A philosopher from the diaspora, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, discusses the pre-eminent challenge of defending human lives and cultural spaces. Faced with processes of rendering others inferior, how can we protect the right to exist? How can we legitimise thinking from elsewhere? In particular, African philosophy, which is a philosophy of weavers, and its transformative aim that nourishes the imagination and inspires creative vitality. Because “we must never allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the darkness of the world”, she tells us.

Listen to episode 3 (in French)

Episode 4 – Youba Sokona: “Enda wanted to be a non-organisation”

How has the NGO Enda TM (Environment and Development Action in the Third World) succeeded in blazing an original trail in the service of development? Why is its legacy so crucial in terms of popular education, training, actions, and research? Why was Enda right? Youba Soukona, a Malian scientist and vice-president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), has contributed to the development of Enda, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Working to protect the environment and promote social justice, the NGO has always operated on the basis of innovative governance and cultivating its rejection of bureaucracy, its closeness to the grassroots, its passion for the cross-fertilisation of knowledge, and its desire to train “differently”.

Listen to episode 4 (in French)

Episode 5 – Jean-Michel Severino – Beyond aid, company-to-company dialogue

Why is the future of Africa so central to the future of the world? Should less developed countries be helped? How can we build a shared world? What lessons can we learn from a lifetime of service to development? In this interview, Jean-Michel Severino, a recognised and respected figure in public development policy, discusses the issues at stake on the African continent and the challenge the world is facing in embracing the ongoing transformations. He shares his views on development aid, its meaning, contributions, limits, and horizons. He concludes with a subject close to his heart: impact investment to support young African entrepreneurs who are the architects of their future.

Listen to episode 5 (in French)

Listen (or listen again) to all the episodes from cycle 1

Des nouvelles de demain is a series orchestrated by Campus AFD in partnership with the Ateliers de la pensée and Agir pour le vivant.