APRIL 2026 | OXFORD, UNITED KINGDOM | Hosted by The Sidebar
During Skoll World Forum week in Oxford, this practitioner-focused dialogue convened organizations, service providers, funders, and ecosystem partners working across diverse LGBTIQ+ programming contexts. Hosted by The Sidebar, the session formed part of a broader and ongoing effort to strengthen shared learning, practical collaboration, and evidence generation across organizations supporting vulnerable communities in highly varied and often constrained environments.
The discussion explored how organizations are currently measuring impact, adapting programming, and generating evidence within contexts shaped by criminalization, stigma, migration, exclusion, social hostility, uneven visibility, and rapidly changing political realities. Across the session, a central tension consistently emerged between the need for credible evidence for LGBTIQ+ programming, particularly within under-recognized and under-resourced contexts, and concerns about reproducing rigid or extractive measurement systems that fail to capture what matters most within people’s lives and communities.
The challenge is not whether evidence matters, but how to build it without reproducing extractive measurement systems, while also giving practitioners greater power to define and measure what actually matters within their communities.
Conventional evidence systems often fail to reflect LGBTIQ+ realities
How do you measure being treated like a human being?
While organizations already track conventional indicators (including healthcare outcomes, service uptake, and economic participation, among others), these measures alone fail to reflect the conditions that determine whether individuals are willing or able to seek support safely in the first place.
Conventional approaches to demographic categorization, satisfaction surveys, intake systems, or beneficiary tracking also function differently within contexts where disclosure itself may create risk, where identities may remain fluid or intentionally undisclosed, or where individuals may have limited alternatives for support.
The distinction between whether someone feels genuinely safe, respected, and supported versus whether a service simply represents the only available option emerged as an important tension throughout the discussion. Satisfaction alone may not meaningfully reflect trust, dignity, safety, or wellbeing within environments where individuals are navigating fear, exclusion, stigma, or survival.
Existing prevalence assumptions and evidence frameworks are also frequently drawn from high-income settings and applied across very different cultural, legal, and social environments despite major differences in visibility, criminalization, migration patterns, family structures, stigma, and social norms. Without stronger contextually grounded evidence generation, many LGBTIQ+ experiences across low- and middle-income countries risk continuing to be interpreted through incomplete or poorly matched reference points.
Building an evidence base without recreating the “Measurement Machine”
Building stronger evidence for LGBTIQ+ programming remains critically important. Across many sectors and regions, LGBTIQ+ experiences, needs, outcomes, and operational realities remain underrepresented within mainstream research, development frameworks, and funding systems.
At the same time, significant caution emerged around simply reproducing highly rigid evidence cultures already shaping the development sector. Measurement itself also carries operational cost and burden. Within highly constrained environments, the demands of measurement compete directly with the time, flexibility, responsiveness, and relationship-building required to deliver services effectively. Organizations questioned whether LGBTIQ+ programming should replicate systems primarily designed around institutional reporting requirements rather than lived experience, contextual realities, or human complexity.
Not everything that matters can be easily standardized, quantified, or compared across contexts. Questions around dignity, safety, affirmation, trust, future possibility, belonging, visibility, or quality of life often resist rigid measurement while still remaining central to whether programs are meaningfully improving people’s lives.
This does not reduce the importance of evidence. Rather, it creates a need for more adaptive, context-sensitive, and human-centered approaches capable of integrating quantitative outcomes with lived experience, qualitative insight, storytelling, and community knowledge.
The challenge is not whether evidence should exist, but how to build evidence systems that remain grounded in the realities of the communities they are intended to serve.
Practitioners are already identifying what matters most
Organizations are already developing nuanced and highly adaptive understandings of what meaningful impact looks like in practice.
Rather than focusing exclusively on whether a service was delivered, organizations are increasingly attempting to understand whether people feel safer, more confident, more connected, more visible, more stable, or more capable of navigating their lives after engaging with support systems.
Questions such as:
- Are needs actually being met?
- Does someone feel safe?
- Has their sense of possibility changed?
- Are they more connected to care, work, housing, or community?
- Do they feel affirmed, visible, respected, or humanized?
often provide deeper insight into long-term impact than standardized indicators alone.
Several examples illustrated how these dynamics shape programming directly. Within trans healthcare settings, the experience of arriving at a clinic and being welcomed or treated by another trans person may significantly shape trust, safety, engagement, and willingness to continue care, particularly within environments where gender-affirming services remain heavily stigmatized or politically contested.
Similarly, organizations working in healthcare contexts described how visible allyship, queer representation, and culturally aligned service delivery can significantly influence whether individuals feel safe enough to return or access care at all.
The discussion also highlighted emerging work around aging within queer communities, particularly across low- and middle-income settings where research, policy, social systems, and support structures often fail to account for the distinct realities queer individuals face later in life. Questions around isolation, economic vulnerability, caregiving, social protection, visibility, and long-term security remain significantly underexplored despite their importance to community wellbeing.
These examples reinforced that practitioners are best positioned to identify the measures of change, vulnerability, resilience, and support that matter most within their own contexts.
Practice is already advancing faster than formal frameworks
Practitioners are already innovating in response to the realities they face, often without formal recognition, institutional guidance, or dedicated evidence frameworks.
Organizations are continuously adapting approaches to outreach, confidentiality, trust-building, service integration, evidence collection, and community protection in ways shaped directly by local realities and operational constraints.
One organization described allowing clients to use self-selected identifiers rather than requiring formal names during clinical intake processes. The approach reduced fear and stigma for service users while still allowing organizations to maintain longitudinal records, compare clinical results across visits, and monitor continuity of care over time. The example highlighted how practitioners are already designing context-sensitive approaches that balance protection, operational realities, and evidence generation simultaneously.
Across the discussion, adaptive practice repeatedly emerged not as a departure from effective programming, but as the mechanism through which effective programming becomes possible within constrained environments.
Storytelling, qualitative insight, and lived experience remain essential
Qualitative approaches, storytelling, and lived experience remain essential forms of evidence within LGBTIQ+ programming.
Many of the most meaningful changes organizations are attempting to support cannot be fully understood through quantitative indicators alone.
Experiences of affirmation, dignity, trust, belonging, safety, joy, stability, or future possibility often emerge most clearly through narrative, reflection, testimony, and lived experience. Storytelling was identified not simply as communications work, but as a legitimate mechanism for understanding how programs shape people’s lives over time.
Importantly, qualitative evidence does not exist in opposition to quantitative evidence. Both remain important and often complementary. The discussion reinforced growing interest in mixed-methods approaches capable of integrating measurable outcomes with lived experience, community knowledge, contextual realities, and longitudinal understanding of change.
Patterns themselves also hold value. When certain approaches, experiences, or outcomes begin emerging consistently across different organizations and contexts, they can help identify broader lessons and effective practices. At some point, not everything needs to be repeatedly measured in order to remain meaningful or true.
Emerging opportunities for shared learning and evidence building
Organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities are generating important learning around trust, safety, visibility, continuity of care, representation, outreach, protection, wellbeing, and engagement that may offer broader lessons across healthcare, mental wellbeing, livelihoods, protection, and social development sectors.
Many organizations across different regions are navigating remarkably similar tensions around evidence, legitimacy, safety, visibility, and institutional expectations despite operating within very different legal and social environments. This creates important opportunities for continued practitioner-led collaboration, shared learning, and collective reflection around what meaningful evidence, effective programming, and context-sensitive evaluation can look like across constrained environments.
This dialogue was informed through ongoing collaboration, consultations, convenings, and informal exchanges with practitioners, organizations, and ecosystem partners. Named contributors and affiliated organizations are included only where explicit consent has been provided, recognizing that visibility, public affiliation, or participation may carry differing levels of professional, institutional, or personal risk across contexts. Listed contributors represent only a portion of the broader ecosystem of organizations, practitioners, funders, and communities whose experiences and perspectives continue to shape this work.
NAMED CONTRIBUTORS:
Akudo Oguaghamba (she/ her), Founder & Executive Director, Women's Health and Equal Rights Initiative (Nigeria) Brian Aliganyira (he/ him/ his), Founder & Executive Director, Ark Wellness Hub (Uganda) Fleury Irakoze (she/ her), Founder & Executive Director, Harbor of Hobe Refugee Support Initiative (Uganda)
Tyler Nelson (he/ him), Convener, Waypoint Commons (Global)