PeGASuS 5 - 7: Solutions Exchange - Africa led priorities, global learning partnerships

This interactive session convenes participants from Future Earth’s Program for Early-stage Grants Advancing Sustainability Science (PEGASuS). PEGASuS cohorts 5–7, spanning Africa and other regions, advance African priorities for sustainability transformation through practical, transdisciplinary collaboration. While PEGASuS projects are globally distributed, the session is intentionally designed so that African sustainability needs and decision contexts set the agenda, and participants from outside the continent contribute as learning partners, sharing methods, tools, and partnership models that can support Africa-relevant pathways to action.  The session addresses a persistent bottleneck: high-quality sustainability research too often fails to translate into policy uptake, implementation partnerships, and measurable impact. This is frequently driven by fragmented knowledge systems, limited science–policy engagement, and power dynamics that constrain equitable co-production. Through short, outcomes-focused project spotlights and facilitated “solutions sprints,” participants will share what has worked across PEGASuS projects, community-led approaches, science–policy interface strategies, and (where relevant) digital/AI-enabled decision support, and then co-design next-step collaborations tailored to African contexts.  The session will generate tangible outputs during the conference: a cross-cohort set of practical uptake lessons, 2–3 collaboration clusters with committed partners, and a clear 6–12 month set of next steps. The design explicitly integrates diverse knowledge types, scientific, policy, practitioner, and Indigenous/local knowledge, linking them to action through implementers, policymakers, and community partners.