Megatrends are macroeconomic and geostrategic forces that are shaping the world. Megatrends are significant and include some of society’s biggest challenges— and opportunities. The concept of megatrends is not new. Companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations may call megatrends by different names, but the most effective ones have organized their strategy in some way, shape, or form around them. Many countries, organizations and regions in the world are assuming megatrend and foresight analysis to be able to meet the challenges these megatrends present and maximize their benefits.

Successfully identifying, analyzing, and acting on megatrends is essential for governments to serve their citizens better. Megatrend and foresight analysis allows governments to build a long-term strategy that is proactive, rather than reactive, makes sense of where they stand today, ensures they have a relevant foresight plan to ensure that they can cope with the disruptive and transformative changes witnessed worldwide, and allows them to have better development prospects in the future. This type of analysis can and should be leveraged as a key input to innovating all areas of a government operation including both internal and external change.

This project aims to produce the necessary knowledge, awareness, and capacity-building for governments and policymakers in the Arab region to be able to effectively engage in megatrend and foresight thinking analysis to be able to analyze and capture more the impact of megatrends on their societies and thus, shape today’s programs to meet the needs of tomorrow. To support member States, ESCWA will develop the needed tools to strengthen the Knowledge and capacities of national stakeholders to understand the benefits of megatrend analysis and use the megatrend and foresight thinking analysis methodology to identify the megatrends shaping the world and their countries, produce foresight analysis training materials that will improve their ability to develop policies targeting development and strengthens their capacity to implement the SDGs.