Outside the silos

By Kenji Maghoma

For years, we’ve spoken about intersectionality, multidisciplinary approaches and systems thinking. We know the value of collaboration and the importance of stepping outside the silos; these concepts have shaped academic debates, social movements and design practices. But I worry that amid the understandable urgency, the fatigue, the crises and the calls to boycott, we risk losing sight of the possibilities that open up when we cross into sectors we don’t fully understand or always agree with.

This has been on my mind lately. This week, COP30 kicked off with thousands gathering once again under the banner of climate ambition. Yet traditional policy actors speak one language, innovators another; energy has its room, fashion its corridor; mayors sit on one panel, finance execs on another. And migration? often disconnected from the conversation. Even though we all agree that circularity cannot be addressed without mobility, innovation cannot scale without cities, cities cannot transform without culture and policy cannot change without imagination.

If we take it seriously that the solutions we need cannot emerge in silos, then the policy implications become clear e.g. climate action must become a cross-sector undertaking, not a sector in itself.

And another way is indeed possible: just a few weeks ago, I attended the H&M Foundation Global Change Awards Summit in Stockholm where I met incredible individuals working at the intersect of sustainability and fashion.

I was there to celebrate The Revival, the Accra-based community-led innovation hub addressing global textile waste coming from the West to Ghana; and The Loom App, a London based start-up connecting consumers with designers to upcycle their wardrobe – both taking the stage as award recipients.

We first met The Revival and The Loom together in Accra earlier this year, as part of a cultural-exchange hosted by LAGO Collective alongside ReLondon and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly for the Africa-Europe Mayors’ Dialogue, a platform of Mayors hosted by ODI Global and LAGO. This felt like a full-circle moment that underscored something essential: the spirit of The Beauty of Movement, which LAGO carries so fiercely, is made stronger by the network of people, ideas, talent and cultures across borders.

Which brings me to the recently launched LAGO Collective podcast, (un)common ground, a series on movement, borders and everything in between where we

explore precisely the power of these connections and demonstrate how convening different perspectives can help us rethink borders of all kinds. We don’t need to collapse distinctions between sectors because each one carries its own expertise. However, we do need to become better at meeting in the middle because the solutions we are seeking already exist in the intersections.

Together, these moments and experiences reminded me how important it is to look beyond our sectors and biases. To ask where we have become comfortable and where we might open new points of connections to find better solutions.

The word at the forefront of my mind is connection, the kind that is real, cross-sector, uncomfortable and generative. The kind that makes better solutions possible.