Expectations Exceed Outcomes at the 2025 Skoll World Forum
Skoll Delegates Confront The Big Challenges of a World in Upheaval — With Mixed Results
A World Order in Free Fall
Many of the global systems we’ve counted on for decades are not just broken, they’re being blown up:
- USAID effectively dismantled within months
- The US administration’s formal rejection of the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals
- A spiraling tariff war threatening global supply chains and economies
These disruptions compound as climate-charged disasters intensify and advancements in equality are set back worldwide.
#SkollWF 2025 Delegates Respond
While social entrepreneurs demonstrated resilience and philanthropists pledged incremental increases, the collective response from Skoll remains insufficient against the scale of systemic collapse.
We posed the following question to Skoll delegates prior to the Forum’s start. How did they do in responding?
Who is responding most effectively to our interconnected crises?
Verdict: Social entrepreneurs will keep grinding and donors will step up incrementally. However, the social sector still resists the radical moves needed for true disruption.
What approaches are showing promise amid unprecedented challenges?
Verdict: The timing of the Forum’s programming largely preceded the recent political upheaval, resulting in frameworks that sometimes felt disconnected from April 2025’s urgent realities. While hope remains essential, conversations must begin with acknowledgment of systems already in collapse.
How are the most experienced champions focusing their responses and shaping their narratives?
Verdict: Leading voices spotlighted injustices to reshape worldviews and policies. Their clarity penetrates confusion, but we didn’t hear many responses proportionate to the scale of disruption.
What strategic reorientation might guide our work forward?
Verdict: The international aid systems built over decades were shattered in moments. The transition from aid dependence to self-sufficiency, while necessary, requires careful bridging to prevent immediate suffering. Solutions proposed at the Forum fall short of this monumental task.
Continue reading for more on how we reached our conclusions.
Question 1: Who is responding most effectively to our interconnected crises?
The Forum highlighted many “doers” who are making positive impacts in their communities despite seemingly insurmountable odds, most notably the Skoll Awards for Social Innovation winners.
The winning initiatives featured solutions to challenges faced by communities around the world — from enabling employee ownership in the companies they work for, to paying community health workers a living wage, to replacing dirt floors in homes with sanitary and sustainable alternatives.
The Forum also gave major philanthropic players the opportunity to announce funding increases to help fill the void left by governmental cuts:
- Skoll Foundation: 30% spending increase ($25 million additional)
- MacArthur Foundation: Payout increase from 5% to 6% (approximately $75 million annually)
- Trevor Noah Foundation: New $1.75 million venture philanthropy fund for South African education
Reality check: These commitments, while significant, represent a fraction of what’s needed. The combined annual spending of top US foundations to international development (approximately $13 billion) pales against global Official Development Assistance ($223 billion) and former US contributions ($65 billion).
Verdict
- Social entrepreneurs will keep working, keep trying with limited funding, keep finding solutions that are practical and innovative — in other words, keep doing what they’ve always done with added drive. For them, it’s real life.
- Donors said they would step up funding levels — incrementally for the most part. For us, there was not enough commitment to radical restructuring — refocusing endowments as active social capital, making zero-based program decisions, and cutting their bureaucracies dramatically. This is where the most change is needed.
Question 2: What approaches are showing promise amid unprecedented challenges?
We heard many “tried and true” solution approaches reinforced:
- Prioritizing beneficiary dignity
- Embracing generational horizons beyond immediate outcomes
- Centering local leadership and solution ownership
- Developing innovative funding models beyond traditional philanthropy
- Scaling ambition beyond initial pilot areas
- Elevating indigenous leadership at all levels
Technology solutions, while not the Forum’s focus, showcased adaptive approaches. Pelonomi Moiloa’s Lelapa AI is building Small Language Models for African languages, turning data scarcity into an opportunity for ethical AI development that prevents extractive practices. Shabana Basij-Rasikh’s School of Leadership Afghanistan reaches 19,000 girls through WhatsApp-based education — crisis-resilient learning accessible via borrowed phones.
Verdict
- The timing of getting submissions and speakers for the conference meant that most sessions were framed before the Trump “blow-up”. Therefore, Forum organizers cannot be faulted for not addressing it directly.
- Still, the general solution approach principles threaded throughout the conference seemed almost quaint for April 2025. Hope is always good but we think a harder look at the real world and the ongoing dissolution of the global support system needs to happen faster.
Question 3: How are the most experienced champions focusing their responses and shaping their narratives?
Three standout voices offered clarity amid complexity:
Malala Yousafzai called for international recognition of Taliban oppression as “gender apartheid” — a deliberate framing that triggers specific legal mechanisms and obligations beyond cultural relativism.
Trevor Noah posed a thought experiment: What if everyone’s bank accounts randomly switched every 17 months? This deceptively simple concept forces confrontation with how much privilege stems from luck rather than merit, potentially catalyzing greater empathy in system design.
Dr. Denis Mukwege exposed the direct connection between consumer technology and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, challenging the tech industry and consumers to demand transparent, ethical supply chains that benefit local communities while meeting global needs.
Verdict
- What made these leaders stand out was their concrete messages to awaken global empathy and confront systemic exploitation.
- It is probably unfair to criticize them for their hopeful approaches and specific recommendations. Maybe we need to stay on this level of aspiration, to not succumb to how Trump administration policies are trying to make the world more chaotic and cruel.
- For us — the jury is still out. We’ve invested 15 years in advocating for the SDGs and catalyzing startups and social entrepreneurs to do good change in the world. To be effective, the social sector’s response must be as extreme as the Trump administration’s attacks, and we didn’t see the necessary level of radical thinking and revolutionary actions to counter this offensive at Skoll.
Question 4: What strategic reorientation might guide our work forward?
Two primary directions emerged from Forum discussions:
1. Unleash All Philanthropic Assets
Darren Walker, outgoing President of the Ford Foundation, challenged foundations to abandon their focus on intergenerational wealth preservation and shift toward collaboration rather than competition. The philanthropic sector’s response must match the extremity of current attacks on development infrastructure — incremental adjustments cannot counterbalance systemic dismantling.
2. From Aid Dependence to Local Reliance
Open Society Foundation’s President Binaifer Nowrojee suggested reframing the aid crisis as an opportunity to build regional self-sufficiency and reconsider government responsibilities. This perspective offers long-term promise but must acknowledge the “careless and callous” (Jeff Skoll) nature of abruptly severing lifelines for vulnerable communities.
Verdict
- This necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention approach may ultimately drive effective responses, but will cause much unnecessary suffering in the near-term.
- Development aid is still the only option for many developing countries, at-risk communities, refugees, and forcibly displaced people. Simply taking away their life-saving resources isn’t going to equip their governments step up.
- Voluntary philanthropic commitments seem trite in the face of such immense social sector chaos. We want to see politicians and institutions taking stands and taking risks for what they believe in. We want to see billionaires speaking out and stepping up. We want to see every foundation and Donor Advised Fund (DAF) committing to 10%, 20%, 30% disbursements annually for at least the next four years.
Beyond Broken: Forging New Paths in an Era of Systemic Upheaval
Any other year we would likely have left Skoll conference feeling excited about the increase in commitments and new developments. But this is 2025 and when faced with radical changes, we need radical solutions. We hope the philanthropic and social sectors can respond as quickly to transform development work as the Trump administration has worked to destroy it.
Maybe our questions were unfair. Maybe getting new, silver-bullet-answers was too big of an ask for three days of meetings and panels in Oxford. But the Skoll World Forum has a 25-year-plus track record of celebrating and supporting social innovation (backed by $1.2 billion in unrestricted funding to social entrepreneurs).
So if we can’t ask the tough questions of Skoll leaders, who can we ask?
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Note: Generative AI tools were used in the creation of this article to assist with research, summarization, and editing.
