WokeOnPaperThe Funding Fashion Cycle
Some problems become fundable. Others quietly disappear from the menu.
Funding priorities shape what organisations can work on. When a theme becomes popular, suddenly many organisations are encouraged to build programmes around it, measure it and demonstrate results.
Meanwhile, deeper problems can struggle for attention because they are harder to explain, slower to change and more difficult to measure. Caste, migration, child labour and exclusion rarely fit into a neat skills programme.
The question is not whether twenty-first-century skills matter. It is whether funding choices allow organisations to address the structural conditions that determine who gets access to those opportunities.
