There are many global conversations about women, girls, and economic empowerment. But far fewer that ask a harder question:
What if we are measuring the wrong things entirely?
At Skoll and Africa Hits London, our presence was not about visibility. It was about challenging a system that continues to misunderstand where real value lives. Her Initiative Founder and Executive Director Lydia Charles Moyo was there to spark hard conversations that inspire and change how the rest of the world views on women and girls when it comes to what they need and what impact really means.
Because for organizations working closely with women and girls, the reality is clear:
Impact does not always look like scale.
And it rarely fits neatly into financial metrics.
It looks like:
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A young woman building income where there was none
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A community shifting what it believes women can do
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Trust that takes years to build and seconds to overlook
Yet, these are often treated as secondary to numbers that are easier to count.
So why speak?
Because silence allows the wrong definitions to persist.
Right now, we are entering a moment shaped by shrinking aid and rising pressure on organizations to “do more with less.”
But beneath that is a deeper issue:
We still do not fully understand what is being lost.
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When funding declines, do opportunities for young women shrink or simply disappear quietly?
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When organizations are called “resilient,” are they actually growing or just absorbing pressure?
These are not technical questions. They are questions of equity, power, and whose realities are taken seriously.
At Africa Hits London, one idea stood out clearly:
Women-led organizations are not just participating in development, they are redefining it.
They are closer to communities.
They build differently.
They stay longer.
But the systems that fund development are still not designed for that kind of work. And that misalignment has consequences. For us at Her Initiative, speaking in these spaces is not about representation. It is about repositioning the conversation.
From:
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Outputs → to lived outcomes
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Short-term funding → to long-term sustainability
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Visibility → to influence
Because if the system continues to reward what is easy to measure,
it will continue to overlook what actually drives change.
This is the tension we are naming. And this is why we speak. Not to be part of the conversation but to shift it.