In polarised times, making space to dream together

It is an airless, hot day in a dark training room in Abuja.

As our guests sweep in with their elegant, bright robes, I greet each with a hand to my heart. Around the room sit faith and cultural champions from northern Nigeria’s most conservative states, partners delivering reproductive health services, and our Nigeria team: researchers, producers, storytellers and project managers. I am the visitor from outside the country. 

The team is anxious. Working with local media partners and communities, we have spent 18 months designing a multi-platform media project on birth spacing in a context where some believe it contradicts religion. Others believe lime juice can act as a “natural” contraceptive, or that the pill causes infertility. We are trying to centre women’s decision-making while recognising the social dynamics that shape their choices. In parts of northern Nigeria, large families have long signalled wealth and security. Early marriage and polygamy are common, and family pressures can intensify competition between wives and the urgency to have children quickly. Choice here is a complex term.

Outside of my work as an advisor for the BBC’s international development charity, I am a life coach, drawing upon organisation and relationship systems training. And recently, those lines have begun to blur, shaping how I approach global work. Using metaphor, story and explicit conversations on how we work together can help navigate across differences to common ground, and translate our findings into media content with impact for the communities we support.

Here in Nigeria, I experiment with one of my favourite coaching exercises: High Dream, Low Dream. We time-travel, imagining the project three years from now, with healthier mothers and children and families able to support the children they have. Then we name our nightmares: backlash, misunderstanding, the risk of harm. For our faith partners, fears about religion, culture and family breakdown are real. We let both visions sit before us.

And here’s the part I like - the part that reminds us of our power. We are not passive observers of these futures. We can influence which unfurls before us. Not entirely, but enough that this next bit is crucial. We ask what actions would bring each future into being, and something shifts. There is a sense of collective agency and responsibility.

It is the third time I have stood in an airless training room in Abuja grappling with a challenging topic with this team, and the third time I have walked away in awe. Without the insight of those closest to the issue, this work would fail.

We live in a time of polemics. Increasingly we associate with those who think like us, look like us, agree with us. We vilify those who don’t. The information we consume often amplifies our divides, through algorithms designed to make rich and powerful people richer still.

Yet we face global, collective challenges. If we can find courage to name not just our dreams but also our fears, we may also discover our collective agency: a turning point where dreaming and fearing give way to action.

This workshop was part of a wider project supporting agency around child birth spacing in northern Nigeria through informed content and work with local media partners. Delivered with our local partners, the initiative brings together research, community engagement and multi-platform media to help families access accurate information and navigate choices about health and wellbeing.