A Dispatch From Oxford

Reflections as a first-time Skoll attendee

I’ve been in Oxford this whole week to attend my first Skoll World Forum, and spent most of my days in a whirlwind of official events, side events, side-side events, and meetings.

In other words, it was very intense. It was also inspiring, introspective, and insightful. As usual, I wish there was more discussion on power.

That’s not really a big surprise, given the 1,500+ attendees came mostly from the worlds of social entrepreneurship and philanthropy. I also learnt a critical new skill: the ability to quickly scan people’s conference badges to discern who they are.

What all of this means is this week’s issue is short-ish, and there won’t be Thin’s Pickings since I haven’t had much time to read beyond my script.

Oxford. Photo by me.

I have to admit I felt like a fish out of water on the first day.

Everyone I met had a cool, shiny product they’d designed, a life-saving service they’d launched, or an inspiring vision to address wealth and gender gaps. They all seem to know each other too, and the myriad of acronyms swirling around us.

Me? I have a lot of opinions and statistics about our food systems, but very little else.

What heartened me was that pretty much everyone I spoke to was shocked when I told them about food systems’ contribution to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the roots of the latest fertiliser crisis, and why food security isn’t just about availability.

Even in a forum like this - where the focus is on changing things for the better - food systems remain surprisingly underexplored.

It was a good reminder to never assume that the nitty gritty of food systems is widely understood, even among very smart, very motivated people. What feels like old news to those of us in the weeds can very much be new news to everyone else.

But I also met others who are in the weeds just as deep as I am, at side events outside of the main Forum.

• A Māori food activist from Auckland spoke about wanting to move beyond food security to food sovereignty, not just having enough to eat, but having the power to decide what you grow and how.

• A Kenyan pastoralist described losing her community’s grazing land to the creeping pressures of globalisation, watching the space her animals needed simply disappear.

• And a South African woman said her community can no longer freely share or exchange the seeds they save, with the terms dictated by trade agreements rather than farmers. So now they’re learning from Brazil’s MST (the Landless Workers’ Movement) how to push back against governments that seem more comfortable in an ivory tower than in a field.

What was energising about this conversation was that, despite the uphill battle, none of these people were waiting to be saved. They were organising, mobilising, and drawing on each other. They mentioned a concept in Zulu and Xhosa philosophy - ubuntu - often translated as “I am because we are”. I kept coming back to it all week.

Of course, I was in Oxford to moderate a panel on how we can better support women farmers, and that session brought the philosophy of ubuntu to life in concrete, practical, and radical ways.

I’ll share the video when it’s ready, but below are the key takeaways.

Five things I learnt from the panel

1. Organise first. Everything else follows.

In India, where women often work on land they may not own and grow food they may not eat because they are part of the unorganised sector, the most transformative shift is getting them organised as entrepreneurs, not labourers, said Reema Nanavaty, Director of Economic & Rural Development at the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).

SEWA’s decades of work show that when women are organised into collectives, cooperatives, and farmer-producer organisations, they gain bargaining power, access to markets, financial services, and training—and an identity beyond labour.

She should know: SEWA has some 3.7 million members, more than half of whom are farmers, and Reema oversees over 10,000 self-help groups and 160 cooperatives.

A concrete example is the “100-mile project,” launched to deal with the disruptions caused by COVID-19. It’s about sourcing and redistributing food locally and now includes hundreds of warehouses, cold chains, and food centres owned and managed by women.

Organising is slow, unglamorous work. But it is the foundation everything else is built on.

“When women are organised, when services are bundled, when risk is shared, um and when dignity of women is central, food systems will become resilient and scale,” she said.

“Regenerative agriculture is not just about soil or seeds or crops,” she added. “It is about power. And power in the hands of women and farmers.”

2. Local and collective knowledge is the real safety net.

Elizabeth Mpofu, co-founder of the African Women’s Collaborative for Healthy Food Systems and a veteran agroecological farmer, shared the story of another Zimbabwean farmer who lost her traditional seeds to a prolonged drought, and with it, her ability to feed her family. It was also a loss of heritage.

What helped her recover wasn’t an outside intervention or a new technology. It was her community. Through seed and food fairs - gatherings where farmers share both seeds and knowledge - she recovered what had been lost.

She then began intercropping traditional varieties that are resilient to changes in climate, drew on traditional knowledge, and worked collectively with neighbours on the labour-intensive tasks no single person could manage alone. Today, she produces enough for her family and sells the surplus.

Elizabeth expanded on the idea of collective knowledge and power later when talking about brittle global supply chains.

“What sustained the communities is what has been closest to them… owning their own seeds, their connection with the soil, and the knowledge they have, especially on their everyday practices.”

She also made a sobering point about what happens when that thread breaks. When farmers lose their seeds and turn to commercial varieties, those crops may perform well initially but they are vulnerable to drought and depend on herbicides and pesticides. Worse, farmers can end up working in isolation, each one fending for themselves.

“When farmers are in isolation, there’s an increase in vulnerability. Working collectively is something which also leads to greater prosperity.”

3. Inclusion requires deliberate, practical design, not just good intentions.

Root Capital’s 2023 research across more than 1,200 loans and 550 businesses found that investing in women isn’t just the right thing to do. It makes clear financial sense too. But as Alexandra Tuinstra, Root Capital’s Chief Program Officer, was quick to point out: “Capital is not enough.”

When Alexandra’s organisation started running training workshops for agricultural businesses, they realised women weren’t really turning up. Rather than assuming they weren’t interested, they asked why. The answers were practical: childcare, time, not being explicitly invited. So Root Capital fixed each one.

They set participation targets. They made it possible to bring children. They made sure women attendees can truly participate and not take on extra administrative and logistical burdens. They also made a gender checklist - simple rules that address these barriers preventing women from accessing training, technology, knowledge, and skills.

Alexandra also stressed the need to shift from a “resilient mindset” to a “thriving mindset”.

When I asked her for an example, she told us about a place that started out as a day-care facility by a woman business owner and became a craft centre that sells products to buyers coming for the agricultural produce. Not only did it become profitable, it had surplus funds to invest. The women decided to make 3,000 reusable menstrual kits - beautiful, colourful cloth pads - and distributed them to local girls and young women, along with information about fertility health.

“That’s thriving,” Alexandra said. “It’s having the agency. It’s being able to do more than get through. We can’t just stick to bouncing back. We want to bound and move forward.”

4. Technology must be designed for the people it claims to serve.

There’s a belief in some quarters that technology will solve everything. Alesha Miller, Chief Strategy Officer for Digital Green, isn’t one of them. But she knows it can help when done right.

Farmer Chat, Digital Green’s AI advisory chatbot, has been installed 1.6 million times, 36% by women. This year they’re aiming for 4 million users, with 45% women in the new cohort.

The early usage data is striking: women ask more and longer questions, and keep digging, what the tech world calls “multi-turn questions”, where each answer prompts a deeper follow-up.

Yet standard AI models aren’t trained on smallholder agriculture. They don’t speak local dialects. Perhaps most strikingly, they weren’t recognising the way women phrase questions: they weren’t picking up on the length, the intonation, the local vernacular.

The fix required going back to basics: fine-tuning language models on local dialects, hiring community extension agents to review and score responses, and publishing the datasets openly so others can see, critique, and improve the work.

Alesha described meeting a farmer named Ruth in Kenya who had been on an agroecological journey for years. It started out because she was concerned that the food in her local market was saturated in pesticides and she refused to feed it to her children and grandchildren. Farmer Chat had helped her refine her composting practice.

“Women are powerful users,” Alesha said. “They want this advisory. They’re deeper, steadier — and there’s a real chance to bring them what they need.”

5. To scale, stop treating pilots like the end goal.

We love a brilliant small project. But too often we leave, and the pilot stays a pilot. So what will it take to scale, I asked the panellists.

Elizabeth called for policies that are genuinely built from the ground up, not handed down.

“A bottom-up approach where the decisions are… coming from the ground, and the farmers themselves are part and parcel of the whole process. That the women especially are included and respected in the policy formulation process.”

Alexandra pointed to what real cross-sector collaboration requires: humility, commitment, and a shared goal that matters more than anyone’s branding.

Reema brought us back to where she started: “The future of food is not money or technology. It is a woman with land, knowledge and choice. And then only you can scale.”

Other things I heard this week

For me, the Forum properly began on Tuesday evening when Trevor Noah interviewed Wawira Njiru, founder and CEO of Food4Education. The full conversation is worth watching (it should appear here soon, I’ve been told) but I was struck by two things he said:

• Your calendar doesn’t need to align with your emotional battery, and you don’t need to feel guilty about resting when needed, or working when you want to. In a week full of world-fixers, it was a radical thing to say.

• Laughter is indeed the best medicine. Humour plays a critical role in navigating a world full of incongruence: the gap between what should happen and what actually is. And humour is something every human being can tap into and should, because otherwise, it will all be darkness.

And in a session about philanthropy in a time of disruption, Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change, made a point I keep returning to: systems change can be undone. So the work doesn’t end with creating change, it’s also about protecting that change.

What this means in practice is thinking carefully about which organisations need endowments, and enough independence, to keep holding the line when political winds shift, she said.

That was definitely food for thought for the interesting times we live in.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.