Rafaela Valencia-Dongo is a design strategist and futurist specializing in the longevity economy, strategic foresight, and the future of education. Rather than specializing in a single field, she has built a portfolio career around designing the infrastructure that helps people and institutions navigate uncertainty with imagination, innovation, and agency. She carries out this work through Retablo Community-Centered Design, the strategic innovation studio she founded.
Rafaela leads the Centre for Strategic Foresight at Continental International Education, a higher education institution serving more than 140,000 students and 4,000+ educators across Latin America. In this role, she designed the Future of Learning Radar, Peru's first education foresight tool, and built the institutional infrastructure for long-term thinking in education. She is also a founding member and co-organizer of Peru's largest EdTech Summit, bringing together the most innovative minds in educational technology from across Latin America and beyond.
Her work on longevity spans both systems and deeply human questions. As Lead Collaborator on the World Economic Forum's Longevity Economy Taskforce, she co-authored "The Longevity Economy Playbook: Designing the Future of an Ageing World" and a WEF article on purpose-driven healthy longevity in Latin America and the Caribbean, leading a global coalition of 25 young leaders on the topic. Her interest in longevity led her to found Afterfin, a DeathTech lab working to break the social taboo around our end-of-life planning.
Following her foresight trajectory, she was selected as a Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellow and is currently building Nos Falta Calle, a mobile-first civic platform inviting Peruvians to capture emerging signals and visions of the future. The initiative aims to create Peru’s first collective archive of imagination: a living source of insight into how people across the country see and shape the long term. The project received a 2026 grant from the Collective Imagination Practice Community, selected from 600 applicants worldwide.
Her work has been recognized with the 2024 EPIC Award for Emerging Leaders, and she has spoken at South Summit on innovation and women in leadership, served as Master of Ceremony for The Gap in Between, and facilitated various workshops. She is a former Curator of the Global Shapers Madrid Hub and attended the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2025.
Today, Rafaela is exploring how societies can design for longer, more purposeful lives while developing the imagination, institutions, and collective capacity needed to shape the futures ahead.
