The year, 2019, was truly exciting for the Social Innovation Academy (SINA). The first SINA Community in Mpigi celebrated five years of existence and a new SINA Community started in Kampala, while the other communities were able to increase their impact and establish themselves fully.
We were able to create an official partnership with the Ugandan Government (Office of the Prime Minister – Department for Refugees) with the goal to “establish a framework for cooperation in providing community space, educational programs and entrepreneurship opportunities for refugees in Uganda.” This is a milestone in moving toward the establishment of new SINA Communities in refugee contexts in Uganda which aim to unleash the potential of the youth, as they create their own solutions in the form of social enterprises. We also started a cooperation with UNHCR – Zimbabwe to replicate SINA in the Tongogara Refugee Camp in 2020 and received two replicator scholars who are currently undergoing training to create their own SINA Community.
The Pan African Award for Entrepreneurship in Education came with a grant to support further replication of the SINA model in other African countries and we are very excited about it. We have created a Community of Communities (we call it a “Community of Practice”) for the continuous unfolding of the evolutionary purpose of the SINA model. All SINA Communities are independently registered, yet we all run on the SINA model and work together to share best practices, support each other and create one collective movement. With an increasing number of SINA self-managed SINA Communities and interest from other African countries, we created “SINA Global,” as self-organized entities based in Germany and Uganda to hold the SINA social license for our ongoing replication and scaling. SINA Global is also home to the Community of Practice and our newly designed SINA Incubator and Accelerator program supporting established SINA social enterprises from 2020 onwards in all SINA Communities to reach higher levels of growth and impact, create more jobs and generate steadily increasing revenues.
This report gives an overview of our impact, our achievements of 2019, and the exciting journey ahead of us. We want to thank all our SINA Communities, replicators, scholars, social enterprise teams and supporters. Without you, none of this would be possible.
Read below the full 2019 Social Innovation Academy (SINA) Impact Report: