Decolonisation and locally led

As STiR fully localises its programmes in Uganda and Indonesia, Co-CEO Jenny Willmott and Uganda Country Director Modern Karema reflect on what they’ve learned so far.

Charles Kojo Vandyck discusses his new book, The Engine Behind the Mission: Re-imagining Non-Profit Operating Models in the Global Majority and how he was inspired to write it having seen passionate teams slowly lose energy, not because they no longer believe in the cause, but because the way their organisation is structured makes everyday work unnecessarily hard.

The community is already empowered. They just need the right convergence point to work with the government and help orient them on this. It is a process of building leadership at the community level.

Sweeping cuts to global aid have ushered in a crisis, but they are also creating the opportunity to transform how global health partnerships develop and function for the better.

The humanitarian system is being challenged, with issues around efficiency, effectiveness and ‘resets’ driving the agenda. But what about the values that guide us as partners and champions of change?

Supporting community-led organisations is one of the best ways to ensure aid is money well spent. As aid budgets shrink, if communities know what they need, why aren’t we trusting them to lead?

The question isn’t whether AI-generated imagery is inherently problematic. It’s about who controls the tools, whose perspectives shape the outputs, and whether we’re willing to invest in community capacity to produce representations at a scale that can genuinely challenge entrenched biases.

In a time of shrinking resources and increasing crises, UNICEF UK describes how it takes proven approaches and embeds them into public systems, scaling solutions through policy and finance to achieve lasting, systemic change.