African Futures Institute Finds Its First Permanent Home in Accra

The African Futures Institute has opened its first permanent headquarters in a converted tile warehouse in Osu, one of Accra's most dynamic neighbourhoods, five years after architect and professor Lesley Lokko OBE founded the organisation.

Since its creation in 2021, the institute has promoted a new model for education built around teaching, research and public events. It operates largely as a network of African changemakers, working through partnerships and temporary spaces across the continent, alongside its flagship programme, the Nomadic African Studio. Until now, that itinerant character has defined the organisation more than any fixed address.

The new building changes that. A team comprising Lokko, Patrick Gentilezza of Buro Ghana, Patti Anahory, Laurence Lord and Fred Swart developed the construction collaboratively, combining architectural direction, design development, construction expertise and fabrication.

The conversion retains the character of the original warehouse while balancing environmental responsiveness and spatial flexibility. The design embodies AFI's adaptive approach to architecture, with flexibility, openness and experimentation at its core. The institute describes the result as more than an architectural milestone: a piece of civic infrastructure where teaching, making, conversation, exhibition and performance live under one roof.

Lokko frames the ambition in direct terms. 'We wanted a building that could hold many futures at once,' she says. 'Not a monument to an institution, but a framework for activity – somewhere that can be a school in the morning, a studio in the afternoon and a public room at night. Architecture, for us, begins with the possibility of bringing people together.'

The headquarters will house AFI's team and archives. It will also host educational programmes, lectures, exhibitions, film screenings, residencies and public events in the Urban Room, a space designed for collaboration.

The institute intends the building to weave itself into Accra's culture and everyday life. For an organisation that has spent its first five years operating nomadically across Africa, the Osu warehouse now gives its network a fixed stage from which to expand its programme of teaching and public discourse.