In November 2025, the Southern Africa Trust convened Dariro 1.0 — bringing together human rights defenders, feminist organisers, youth climate leaders, artivists, and media actors from across Southern Africa with a clear purpose: to collectively map the forces reshaping the region's civic landscape, build shared foresight, and co-create strategies for defending and advancing civic space over the next five years.
That work has only become more urgent. Civic space across Southern Africa — and globally — continues to contract. Aid cuts are reshaping what civil society organisations can do and who gets to do it. Anti-gender movements are gaining ground. Democratic backsliding is accelerating across the SADC region. And the communities most affected by shrinking civic space are still the least resourced to respond.
Against this backdrop, the Dariro Scenario Skills Labs created something rare: a structured, participatory space for civic actors to step back from immediate pressures and think collectively about the futures they want to build. Across three thematic labs — the Future of Human Rights Defence, the Future of Women's Rights and Feminist Organising, and Youth and Climate Futures in Africa — participants mapped systemic realities, explored possible and preferred futures, and designed concrete pathways from 2025 to 2030.
What emerged was not a wish list. It was a roadmap. Participants called for community-rooted funding models to replace shrinking donor pipelines. They named digital safety and protection from surveillance as non-negotiable infrastructure for human rights defenders. They demanded feminist movements across Southern Africa be recognised as governance actors, not just advocacy voices. And they insisted that youth climate leadership move from tokenism to institutionalised power — in national councils, in regional bodies, and in climate financing systems.
These are not distant ambitions. As 2026 deepens the pressures that Dariro anticipated, this report is a living resource — a foundation for the coordinated, anticipatory, justice-centred civil society action that this moment demands.
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