Context

The UNDP Honduras Country Office (CO) partnered with the UNDP Strategy and Futures Team in 2025 to host a Futures Fellow, Ingrid Furtado, to strengthen the CO’s foresight skills and build their long-term futures-thinking capacity. This was done through a mixture of foresight training for 13 CO staff, and practical application of foresight to a key development challenge in Honduras, the futures of education.

“It was important for UNDP Honduras to decide which approach they wanted to pursue: Foresight as a stand-alone product, resulting in a report, set of scenarios, or policy documents; or Foresight as a continuous mindset and process, with the aim of cultivating enduring futures-oriented thinking, anticipatory culture and capabilities, and long-term capacity building.” ~ Ingrid Furtado, Futures Fellow

The process 

The UNDP Honduras foresight initiative ran from June to November 2025 in two online phases. The first phase introduced foresight fundamentals, including theoretical and practical training on strategic foresight, systems thinking and theory of change. The second phase was a formal foresight research project into an area aligned with the Honduras Country Programme Document (CPD) and with broad transformative potential for development: “The Futures of Education and Learning.” 

To conduct the research, the team followed the University of Houston Foresight Framework, a methodical approach for examining the future of a subject from beginning to end. It involves defining the focus, monitoring emerging trends and signals, creating alternative scenarios, assessing potential impacts and strategic challenges, and formulating appropriate responses.

Following the framework, the team worked through Domain Mapping, Horizon and Signal Scanning, research on “TIPPOs” (Trends, Issues, Projects, Projections, and Obstacles), Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), Expert Interviews, Drivers, Matrix Analysis, Scenario creation, Personas and Back-casting exercises. They also ran some special workshops, such as Signals Studios (drawing on UNDP’s proprietory Future Trends & Signals System) and the Futures Served game, a collaborative storytelling tool designed to bridge community voices and policy innovation.

The process concluded with identifying concrete actions that could positively impact the future of education in Honduras between 2025 and 2035.

Throughout the process, the team focused on a fundamental foresight question: whose vision of the future are we moving toward? This guiding reflection shaped the entire initiative, and equipped participants to view issues, policies, and projects through new and more informed lenses, with a futures-thinking perspective. The process allowed diverse stakeholders to come together and express their aspirations, expectations, and concerns.

Preferred scenario for the Educación en Honduras, 2035: De la finca a las aulas (Education in Honduras, 2035: From the Fields to the Classrooms). The scenario highlighted a network of possibilities and connections among UNDP staff, rural communities, and stakeholders, illustrating how foresight can translate from ideas on paper into concrete action. It placed a strong emphasis on rural areas while recognizing Honduras’s diverse geographic and social contexts and the importance of locally-led community initiatives.

Outcomes and impacts 

The research concluded by proposing action plans to be piloted in one to three rural communities in Honduras, from 2025 to 2035, depending on the capacity of the country office. The action plans cover three major transformations that can shape the future of education in Honduras:

1. Educational and cultural transformation: the school as a hub for community development

Suggested actions:

• Leverage UNDP’s regional and global experiences and partnerships with other agencies to research comparative experiences elsewhere (rapid web search, calls with key stakeholders)
• Map local initiatives in technological transformation and other areas, drawing on existing experiences in Honduras and adapting them to the local context
• Collect data that demonstrates the need for change
• Identify strategic partnerships to create synergies
• Design solutions around new future-fit curricula and educational programmes for caregivers as well as children

Impact: Education becomes directly linked to the community’s real needs, reducing school dropout rates and strengthening social fabric.

2. Economic and productive transformation: food security and decent rural employment

Suggested actions:

• Measure levels of social cohesion and assess the role and importance of education in building resilient communities
• Assess Honduras’s technical and financial baseline to identify ways to improve the use of education resources
• Develop a diagnostic assessment of the factors that foster or hinder social and cultural cooperation
• Identify existing financing mechanisms (transfers, microcredit, etc.)
• Identify existing public support programmes (national/local)
• Map public support programmes at national and local levels, as well as external cooperation initiatives
• Design solutions to improve skills and access to market for local businesses

Impact: An inclusive rural economy is generated, enabling families to invest in education and well-being.

3. Institutional and social transformation: collaborative governance and violence reduction

Suggested actions:

• Community mapping and participatory diagnosis
• Conduct interviews and focus groups with community leaders, religious representatives, teachers, women, youth, and local authorities to establish how everyday disagreements are managed: disputes over land, resources, coexistence, family, or school-related issues
• Identify conflict patterns and informal resolution mechanisms
• Design solutions to improve governance and safety in schools

Impact: Schools are consolidated as safe, inclusive spaces and centers of youth leadership, forming the foundation for a culture of peace and community resilience.

Learnings and advice 

Fundamentals first

Introducing an educational element by explaining the basics of foresight theory and practice at the beginning of the project was critical in helping the UNDP Honduras team grasp long-term thinking and the value of engaging with multiple futures. Without first understanding foresight as a mindset, the application of methodologies, tools, or techniques would have remained superficial and would not have built lasting capacity within the team.  

Break down the Foresight framework into steps  

The process gave participants—many of whom were new to foresight—the space to become comfortable with the concepts and methodologies at a manageable pace, enabling deeper engagement with the activities.

Pick a practical project with hands-on research  

Finding a topic (The Future of Education/Learning) immediately applicable to UNDP Honduras's work was key to applying the foresight framework and allowing the team to own the process. The UNDP Honduras team showed strong enthusiasm for applying foresight techniques to a real-life challenge and exploring how they could inform action.

Collaborative and flexible engagement approach  

The initiative relied on strong collaboration with a central UNDP Honduras point of contact, online weekly meetings and asynchronous activities. All these were essential to keep everyone on the same page. That said, the team’s way of working could have been even better if it had included longer sessions, occasional in-person workshops, and clearer onboarding and support for asynchronous work. 

Next steps/ Looking ahead 

At the end of the process, participants completed a survey where they were invited to share their impressions and describe how they intend to apply what they learned. Below are some of their observations: 

“I will continue applying futures thinking to plan with vision and anticipate change. This process strengthened my ability to think systemically, imagine scenarios, and lead collaboratively toward sustainable solutions.” – UNDP Honduras Country Office Foresight Training participant 

“I believe that thinking about futures is a skill that needs to be refined, because realistically, all our projects and actions should aim at that. However, it is hard to achieve, since sometimes solving the “day-to-day” feels more important than taking the time to think about future actions. That said, I have enjoyed that this process made it necessary to think systemically and about futures, as well as the learning process and its practical application.” - UNDP Honduras Country Office participant 

UNDP Honduras CO plans to incorporate their foresight skills and training into their future strategic planning and Country Programme Document process in the future.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of UNDP.