The 5 Themes That Stood Out To Me At Skoll Forum 2025
Skoll Week 2025 kicked off with an energizing backdrop—from the historic charm of Oxford to the noticeable mix of resilience and apprehension in the air! Despite the palpable tension and fear related to the recent funding freeze decisions by the US government, warmth, resilience, and positivity could be felt all around. The forum wasn’t merely a series of events; it was an intersection of bold ideas and challenging questions. As Skoll week ended, the following insights and conversations stuck with me as I represented Health In Harmony (HIH), and I thought they were important to document, share, and continue discussing.
1. Shifting Power from Global Minority to Global Majority – But How?
This conversation was held against the backdrop of recent US government funding freeze decisions, creating a timely and urgent context for discussing how the Global (South) Majority could rewrite the blueprint for a new ecosystem.
Participants emphasized shared responsibility across people, places, and time horizons, highlighting the need for collective ownership of sustainability and resilience. There was a strong agreement on building organizational and community capacity so that global majority organizations are not existentially reliant on entities like USAID.
A critical point raised was the preference for allyship over funding alone, with a recognition that true partnership and solidarity offer more enduring support. Many voiced reassurance by noting: "We've been here before (funding freezes) and came out on the other side," affirming confidence drawn from past experiences.
Referencing the worldview of "taking what we have to make what we need," the conversation underscored resourcefulness and collaboration. Ecosystem building emerged as key, advocating for cross-pollination, strength in partnerships, and intentional resource sharing to create and operate effectively as a community.
2. Funders Need To Do Better!
Another theme that emerged more than once at the forum was that funders must reevaluate their roles and responsibilities. Funders need to understand that communities are often trying to solve problems they did not create, and yet they face systemic barriers to accessing adequate financial support.
A significant concern highlighted was the persistently low investment in Africa's research and development sectors, which remains at a mere 1–2% of global R&D funding. This underinvestment also extends to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who are the guardians of Earth’s most climate-critical ecosystems, with solutions that are proven to work. Yet, they continue to be systematically underfunded and overlooked.
Moreover, participants voiced that funders need to take more risks, risks proportionate to their wealth. Traditional funding models often favor low-risk investments, which can stifle creativity, innovation, and unconventional solutions and perpetuate existing inequalities.
A critical issue discussed was the emergence of tech neo-colonialism. This term refers to the modern form of control where powerful tech monopolies exert influence over the Global Majority through technological means. For instance, the dominance of foreign tech companies in Africa's digital infrastructure has led to concerns about data sovereignty, economic dependency, and the marginalization of local knowledge systems. Funders need to step in and help address tech neo-colonialism by actively supporting local tech initiatives and enterprises, prioritizing investments that strengthen digital sovereignty and promote fair technology transfer. We should advocate for and invest in partnerships that center Indigenous and local knowledge and capacities, advocate for fair and equitable digital policies, and fund infrastructure that respects community ownership and self-determination.
Another key issue that was recurrently brought up was trust-based philanthropy and how this approach emphasizes building relationships grounded in mutual trust, accountability, and transparency rather than rigid, top-down controls. Funders are encouraged to shift the paradigm from transactional to transformational partnerships, where they should invest in communities’ abilities to lead their thriving and development agendas, which is proven to result in more sustainable outcomes for the communities and the world overall.
3. Storytelling as an Impact Catalyst and a Funding Acquisition Tool: We Need More than Just Good Intentions
Participants recognized storytelling as a powerful tool for driving impact and securing funding. However, they emphasized that stories of human and community suffering must be told with respect and dignity, ensuring complete community ownership of the storytelling process from start to finish.
It was clearly stated that, from experience, compelling stories attract increased funding where "funders see → funders fund (even more)". However, this must never come at the expense of communities controlling their own narratives. Ethical storytelling must reject the commodification or sensationalization of suffering—we all know the familiar but problematic portrayals of African children facing hunger and economic vulnerability that were intrinsically designed to appeal to Western audiences. These portrayals may have good intentions behind them, but they result in perpetuating harmful stereotypes and stripping communities of their dignity and agency.
This is why we must strongly advocate for communities to shape, produce, and disseminate their own stories, ensuring authenticity and respectful representation of their lived experiences. Communities may not want to tell the stories that funders expect to hear, and that's entirely okay—funders should accept and respect this.
This fully resonated with HIH’s Community Thriving Narrative, one of our key impact data pillars, which invests in communities' audiovisual storytelling created and fully owned by them and whereby they qualitatively demonstrate and discuss community metrics of their thriving by their own definition. Sometimes during this process, communities prefer their stories not to be shared externally, and that too is a valid and important choice that funders and partners must respect.
4. Becoming a Continuous Learning Organization is Imperative
The importance of becoming a continuous learning organization emerged strongly in conversations. It was continuously highlighted that we need to embed ongoing learning and feedback loops within organizational cultures, especially in the context of a rapidly changing, highly polarizing, and complex global landscape.
Continuous learning involves intentionally creating spaces and mechanisms for feedback, reflection, and adaptation. This includes regular and meaningful engagements with community stakeholders to ensure that organizational approaches remain relevant, effective, and responsive to real-time needs and challenges. HIH’s Radical Listening methodology embodies this need, where we listen to rainforest communities’ expertise and invest in implementing their solutions.
Participants emphasized trust-building as a foundational element, achieved through transparent communication, active listening, and responsive adjustments based on community insights. They highlighted that relevant and community-centered monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) are vital tools for accountability and improvement.
In order to improve this practice, organizations need to evaluate the different ways they collect feedback and ensure that the most underrepresented voices are not only heard but prioritized. This requires participatory research into how different socio-demographic groups share their opinions, what barriers might prevent them from participating fully, and how to meaningfully address those barriers. Only through this intentional, inclusive approach can feedback mechanisms become more equitable, capture a fuller range of perspectives, and truly support learning that reflects the diversity of partners and the community members we work with.
5. What about Gender?
I’m covering this final theme not because gender was a dominant topic at the forum, but precisely because, in my experience, it wasn’t. Outside of gender-focused sessions, gender-related variables were seldom mentioned. In broader conversations on funding, evaluation, program design, and impact, gender was largely absent!
When it did appear, it was often limited to basic data disaggregation by "man" and "woman"—a minimum standard that, while necessary, is far from enough. This traditional approach overlooks the complexity of gendered experiences, the influence of power dynamics, and the importance of intersectionality in shaping people’s realities.
This is why I believe we need to vocal about the importance of moving beyond binary data collection and toward gender-sensitive and transformative approaches that account for how existing gender inequalities impact people differently based on their gender identities, roles, and structural inequalities, and other social stratifiers such as age, ethnolinguistic and cultural background, disability, experiences of racialisation and transgenerational colonization, and many more. If organizations are serious about justice and inclusion, gender cannot remain a niche topic discussed only in specialized spaces—it must be fully integrated into mainstream conversations, strategies, and accountability frameworks.
Conclusion
Skoll Week 2025 left me with more questions than answers—in a good way. In the beautiful Oxford setting, amid an attitude of informed hope and optimism, what stood out were not just community resilience and many heartwarming success stories, but also some quiet and not-so-quiet tensions, and many unresolved questions. Skoll offered space for critical thinking and brave conversations—and what emerged for me were themes that still feel urgent, still feel unfinished. This optimism is not incompatible with and should not distract from the urgency of investing in community-led innovation to address global challenges and protect our planet.
From the need to shift power to the global majority, to the call for funders to do more than maintain the status quo, to the imperative of ethical, community-owned storytelling, to embracing learning and feedback in more inclusive and participatory ways, and finally, to the glaring absence of integrated gender-based analysis—these themes are not new. But they need to be repeated time and time again and carried forward.
These reflections are not just a summary of what I heard, but a commitment to the questions we need to keep asking. They are a reminder that what happens after the forum—how we act, reflect, push, and build—is what really matters.