Who we are
AIBIA is an alternative educational, research, and development organization working across so-called “marginal” regions to reimagine how we live, learn, and build together.
We bring universities, local communities, and activist/grassroots initiatives into long-term collaboration, creating spaces where education is not a service delivered to people, but a shared process of thinking, experimenting, and transforming.
Over the last 15+ years, AIBIA has grown from a small project in Sierra Leone into a transregional network with roots in Sierra Leone, Italy, and New York, as well as emerging partnerships in other parts of Europe, the Caribbean, and North Africa.
We work on two levels:
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Daily lived practices in our Living Laboratories – place-based projects in rural and low-income regions implementing alternative ways of living that combine community life, sustainable and circular local economies, and progressive education.
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Research of these daily practices, led by the aibia Think Tank – where we collate ideas and practices within what we call critical reimaginative theory, and which is based upon decolonial and democratic learning, experimentation, and collaborative research.
Together, these form AIBIA Global: a network of people, places, and ideas committed to building livable, just futures from the ground up.
Our story
From the beginning, three convictions shaped our work:
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Communities are not “beneficiaries” but co-designers.
Colonialism and 'development' discourses are hierarchical positions that have underdeveloped much of the 'developing' world. We want to disrupt that imbalance, and include the people living closest to social and ecological crisis in their own responses to those crisis. After all, they know best what needs to change and what is possible. -
Education is not neutral.
It always carries assumptions about whose knowledge counts, what futures are imaginable, and who gets to decide. We consciously work against colonial, extractive, and hierarchical models of knowledge and seek to learn from the ground up and margins. -
Transformation must be lived now.
We don’t only research or teach “alternatives” — we build and inhabit them, however imperfectly, through everyday practices of autonomy, cooperation, and care.
Over time, AIBIA’s work expanded from at risk youth and women's rights, to digital literacy and development projects into broader experiments in prefigurative democracy, autonomous economies, and critical reimaginative education. This shift led to the next step in our story: Italy.
What we do
At the heart of AIBIA is a simple question:
How can we collectively reimagine the worlds we inhabit? How can we practice those alternatives in our daily lives, institutions, and territories? How can we learn from those processes? And how can we be certain that in include and revalorize marginal areas, ideas, and logics into these processes?
To answer this, we work through three interconnected pillars.
1. Living Laboratories
Our Living Labs are place-based experiments in alternative education and development. They are not “projects” that arrive from outside; they are ongoing, co-governed communities that weave together:
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Education – computer literacy for youth, vocational training for adults, immersive field schools, long-term study programs, and residencies for students, postdocs, artists, and activists.
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Local economies – agroecology, craft and food production, circular and autonomous economies (e.g., sustainable cooperatives, olive oil, wine, craft distillation, digital media).
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Community life – shared governance, collective decision-making, and everyday practices of care, autonomy, and taking care of one's community.
Our first long-term Living Labs are:
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AIBIA Sierra Leone – rooted in alternative and non-capitalist development logics, ICT access, youth training, and community-based development in a marginal area of a marginalized country.
AIBIA Italy (Molise) – building an intentional educational community and future cooperative university in rural 'inner area' southern Italy, in collaboration with local residents and international partners.
Future Living Labs are being explored in other regions of the Global South and “internal peripheries” of Europe.
2. Programs & Field Schools
AIBIA designs and hosts immersive educational experiences that function as laboratories for both participants and communities:
Intensive summer and winter schools that combine:
critical theory and social research,
hands-on engagement with local initiatives,
and collective reflection on democracy, autonomy, decolonization, and sustainability.
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University-level field schools linking Sierra Leone, Italy, Jamaica, Germany, Morocco, and beyond.
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Erasmus+ and SDG-oriented cooperation projects that bring students into direct contact with grassroots initiatives, rural and urban peripheries, autonomous economies, and community struggles.
These programs are not “voluntourism” or short-term development trips. They are structured to build mutual accountability, long-term partnerships, and concrete outputs (curricula, films, publications, community tools) that remain useful after participants leave.
3. Think Tank and Critical Reimaginative Theory
Parallel to our Living Labs, the AIBIA Think Tank gathers scholars, artists, writers, activists, and community practitioners who are working on:
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Critical reimaginative theory – developing concepts and methods that not only help us think beyond capitalist, colonial, and authoritarian logics, but to actually implement and experiment with them.
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Prefigurative democracy and autonomous economies – studying and practicing forms of self-governance, mutual aid, and commoning that already exist in movements, squats, rural communities, and everyday life.
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South–North and North–South knowledge circulation – building a truly two-way flow of ideas between places often framed only as “receivers” (like Sierra Leone or rural Italy) and traditional centers of academic power.
The Think Tank produces:
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publications and collective research,
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multimedia outputs (films, podcasts, digital archives),
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and frameworks that directly feed back into our Living Labs and educational programs.
In other words: we do not separate thinking from doing. Theory is shaped by practice, and practice is constantly re-examined through theory.
How we work
Across all sites and projects, AIBIA is guided by a set of core principles:
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Decolonial and anti-extractivism
We refuse models where institutions “use” communities for data, prestige, or credit. Partnerships are built on reciprocity, long-term commitment, and shared ownership. -
Democratic and participatory
We experiment with horizontal governance, collective decision-making, and what we call prefigurative democracy: living, as much as possible, the kinds of politics we wish to see. -
Situated and place-based
We treat each territory — from Makeni to Roccavivara — as a specific world with its own histories, contradictions, and forms of knowledge. There is no one template. -
Autonomous and experimental
We cultivate spaces where people can try things, fail, revise, and try again prefiguratively — in education, in economy, in community life — without being immediately captured by market logics or institutional bureaucracy. -
Global in connection, local in accountability
Our network is international, but our responsibility is always to the communities where we live and work.
Our vision
We believe that the future of education and development will not be built only in capital cities, elite universities, or corporate boardrooms. It is already being invented in rural villages, self-managed spaces, grassroots movements, and “peripheral” regions that are learning to live otherwise.
AIBIA exists to connect these worlds, to give them resources, visibility, and time — and to invite students, researchers, and practitioners into genuine collaboration with them.
Our long-term vision is to help build a global constellation of Living Labs and a cooperative, transregional university-like structure: a network where people can move between territories, study and teach across borders, and collectively reimagine what learning, democracy, and development can be.
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