Skoll World Forum 2026:
Reconnecting and Scouting in One Place
In April, Naoko and Marion spent a few days in Oxford for the Skoll World Forum – an annual gathering that remains a key moment for exchange and discovery in social entrepreneurship.
For FCF, one of the most valuable aspects is the opportunity to meet many of our Impact Partners in one place. Rather than requiring individual travel, the Forum creates an efficient moment for in-person conversations with partners such as Terraso, Ashoka, the Schwab Foundation and Food4Education.
It was truly valuable to meet the team of Food4Education. The organization had been on our radar for some time, and we supported an initial step last year. Jacqueline Frey’s 2025 launch of her Incubator “Nutrition & Food Systems” at FCF helped identify a strong thematic fit, triggering an introductory grant. Being able to connect directly deepened our understanding as we continue to explore future potential. A recent Skoll conversation between founder Wawira Njiru and Trevor Noah provides a good sense of the scale and ambition behind their work: Watch here.
Alongside these exchanges, we joined a closed-door session hosted by the GIIN and Skoll Foundation on catalytic capital. The discussion focused on how philanthropic, endowment, and investment capital can be combined, and how private capital can be mobilized as public funding declines.
We also used the Forum to explore new potential Impact Partners in climate solutions in Sub-Saharan Africa – engaging with a wide range of social entrepreneurs and advancing our scouting of scalable, locally rooted solutions for system change.
