On 30 September 2025, over 200 of you joined us online and in person to hear from a fantastic line-up of 30 guest speakers to consider what’s next for aid and development. The day was full of lively discussion and engaging conversations on important topics relating to the future of the sustainable development sector. Here, we reflect on some of the themes that emerged from three panel sessions held on the day, including a look at power-shifting partnerships, alternative financing models and the root causes of intersecting global crises.
Partnerships that shift power
This session explored how partnerships can shift power by centring local leadership, sharing decision-making, and redistributing resources. David Cunningham (Chief Executive of Kids Operating Room) introduced the innovative work they are doing together with partners in Palestine to design a new hospital in post-conflict Gaza. Dr. Bassam Abu Hamad (a public health specialist from Al-Quds University) joined us online from Gaza to speak about the project and the partnership. After outlining the dire reality for Gaza’s population in terms of access to healthcare, Dr. Bassam highlighted that the problem is not a lack of health professionals;
“health professionals are highly qualified. The rate in Gaza is similar to the UK in terms of physicians and nurses, with around 25 per 10,000 population.”
“The problem is about their ability to work and serve others, due to “[Israel’s] demolition of [health] centres, security concerns, the unavailability of transportation [and] the lack of supportive services such as lab services and imaging services.”
Critically, the partnership with KidsOR is needs-driven. As Dr. Bassam said,
“what is unique about this project is that it’s relevant to the Palestinian need. […] It’s going to be led by Palestinian organisations with rich experience and we will focus on extremely vulnerable population and it’s going to be sustainable. The hospital is going to add value and contribute to [the] reduction in mortality and morbidity among children and women in particular.
[The project also offers] a different example and a different model of care that can be benchmarked by other organisations, [and] will provide an opportunity for employment of the local staff. This is going to help them and their family as well as the country as a whole.”
During the session we also heard from Alex Plant (Chief Executive of Scottish Water) and Lungi Biyela (Utility Partnerships Senior Advisor, WaterAid UK) about the partnership between the two organisations. Alex Plant explained the ethos behind water and sanitation partnerships:
“A SWOP is what we call it. It’s when we work on sanitation and water operator partnerships, SWOP for short. In the normal parlance, a swap is where you give something and you get something back. And that is absolutely the nature of what we do here. It’s about peer to peer working. It’s about sharing of technology, knowledge, expertise. It’s about working together skills, infrastructure, systems. And it’s about building lasting change, not just in the communities in which we work, but across the whole country that we work in”
In the discussion that followed, when asked for one piece of advice on shifting the power, panellists agreed that co-creation and a sense of shared ownership is vital. Lungi Biyela emphasised the importance of the relationship between the partners,
“it’s not about how fast you go whether you want to tick off all your KPIs for your projects, but are we all in this together [and going] in the right direction?”
David Cunningham added that his piece of advice, learned through direct experience, is to
“Listen, but understand how to ask questions,”
“When I’m working with partners anywhere in the world, I make a huge effort to make sure I get my questions right. And then I listen, because I’ve got no idea what the right answer is. If I ask my question in a leading way, often the answer that comes back will be designed to agree with the way I’ve led them, which is wrong”.
Ending the aid trap
Imbalances of power and the reproduction of colonial structures are just one aspect of the pitfalls of aid and development practices that must be addressed. Another related pitfall, particularly relevant following the widespread cuts to Official Development Assistance (ODA), is that of financing models. This panel session, ending the aid trap, looked at alternative routes to sustainable development, considering practical, innovative approaches to development that move beyond reliance on government overseas aid.
Panel chair Gunjan Veda (Global Secretary for The Movement for Community-Led Development) opened the session with a proposition:
“How do we convince governments to stick to their ODA commitments? I want to invite everybody to leave that question behind, because when we engage in that question, what we are doing is we are giving tremendous power once again to those funders. We want to shift that. We want to create. We know the system is dismantling. And that can be a moment not of breakdown, but breakthrough and opportunity. Because that system is colonial, problematic [and] exclusive. We want to build something new, and we do not build something new within this frame of just what is there. Sometimes we have to think outside the frame of what we know.”
The panel, featuring Yankho Mataya (Country Director, WaterAid Zambia), Eoghan Mackie (Chief Executive, Challenges Worldwide), Stella Opoku- Owusu (Executive Director, African Foundation for Development – AFFORD) and Engwase Mwale (Zambian Governance Forum) explored a number of alternative funding structures including diaspora financing, philanthropic crowdfunding, co-financing and social enterprise models.
Stella Opoku- Owusu shared that:
“[AFFORD] invested around 1.8 million USD [between 2013-2023], of which about 40% was co-funded by the diaspora themselves. So this is an example of co-financing with the diaspora.”
“using co-financing structures really enables us to leverage our resources, but also to make impact as well. Under the AFFORD Diaspora Financing programme over the years I mentioned, we have created directly 3500 jobs and impacted probably around 30,000 indirect jobs.”
Yankho Mataya (WaterAid Zambia) highlighted the importance of holding governments accountable for their responsibility to provide essential services including water and sanitation to their citizens, and the need for cross-sector partnerships to enable governments to fulfil their responsibility.
Supporting local economies through job creation & funding for SMEs was another thread that emerged during the panel. As Stella Opoku-Owusu said,“If people have a sustainable jobs and decent jobs, they wouldn’t be calling you in the middle of the night saying, I need money for education for my children.” Eoghan Mackie shared that Challenges Worldwide have worked with more than 7500 social enterprises in 84 different countries. “The core for us, when it comes to sustainability, is the sustainability of the organisation that we’re working with local people to set up, to grow and to scale.”
Also taking a people-first approach, Engwase Mwale explained that the work of the Zambian Governance Forum focuses on strengthening civil society organisations, specifically using the asset based, community led development model.
“[The model recognises that] no community that has got absolutely nothing. We know and acknowledge that communities have indigenous knowledge, they have specific assets. They have specific expertise within their communities and that for us, creates a basis for sustainable action in the communities if we have to build resilience.”
In sum, the alternative financing mechanisms are there, and they work. The question now is how to mainstream this, and scale up these initiatives so that Lower-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) are no longer dependent on foreign direct investment. At the heart of each of these approaches is the ethos of strengthening community-led development and ensuring local voices and priorities are at the heart of lasting change.
Systems thinking in a time of polycrisis
The final panel session of the day zoomed right out to consider the big picture: we are living in a time of ‘polycrisis’, facing intersecting challenges – climate breakdown, violent conflict, economic fragility, and declining aid budgets at the same time as increased humanitarian demand – that require us to move beyond short-term crisis response and rethink the systems that shape our world.
Bringing together expert speakers from across sectors; Jean Saldanha (Director, European Network on Debt and Development – Eurodad), Dr Francesco Sindico (Professor of International Environmental Law, University of Strathclyde) and Dr Sherine El Taraboulsi-McCarthy (Director of Impact and Change, START Network) the discussion began with a question for the audience: what is the main root cause of today’s global crises?
Answers from Slido flooded in on the screen, ranging from capitalism and greed, to inequality and apathy. The panellists’ answers included ineffective leadership (Sherine), finance and global tax systems (Jean), and the western socioeconomic system itself, echoing the audience’s nod to capitalism and greed on Slido (Francesco).
In the conversation that followed, Francesco remarked that “most of these, if not all, are human made”, with the implication that humans also have the power to make change. The panel went on to discuss the legal frameworks upholding the system, which included calls for UN reform, as Jean noted the necessity of thinking beyond the post-World War Two architecture upon which it was founded.
Sherine’s take on the matter was a call to “go back to the activist roots at the heart of the humanitarian development sector”; rather than waiting for the international system to reform, suggesting that in parallel to that process,
“[we need to engage in] activism, and consider “how to build new alliances and what shape those alliances need to take. Think of alliances not in a linear fashion, but think about a shifting mosaic where different alliances fulfil different functions. All of these functions are complementing one another. That is the way I see the future of the of the system.”
Drawing on his own expertise, Francesco spoke to the problem of upholding international law, while also defending the importance of international legal systems: “every country now knows what it has to do. For it to be a responsible global citizen […] we now know who is a global, responsible citizen, who is a legally abiding citizen state in the world and who is not.”
Francesco shared the story of a group of students from the South Pacific who brought their environmental justice case to the International Court of Justice, triggering the world to consider the obligation of states to protect climate systems. “you can see examples out there, both domestically and internationally, of saying enough is enough.” The Paris Agreement is one thing, he said, “But I want something more. I want something more tangible. And this is what these students from the South Pacific brought to the table.”
Towards the end of the session, panel chair Talat Yaqoob asked: “where do you see signs of hope?”
Jean, referring to the Slido wordcloud which asked the audience the same question, said –
“Social movements led by young people. It’s not new. It’s happened throughout history. But what gives me hope is the space that those social movements are being provided to grow into international law cases, where there is a swell of support and institutional work towards making those youth led social movements into something that creates social change. We’ve seen that with climate change, and now we are seeing that with debt, and we are seeing that with a whole lot of other issues. That definitely gives me hope.”
She continued, “the second thing that gives me hope is this call for reparations. […] We are much more acknowledging neo-colonialism. It is time to talk about reparations. It is time to talk about reparations as the just response to a number of the issues that we’re talking about today.”
Francesco added: “reparations as a matter of law, not just of justice. And again, working with creative legal community to actually go for it, not just talk about it.”
