Across SINA’s 24 communities, around 1,000 scholars are discovering their potential and building social enterprises. Many more young people have ideas rooted in challenges they know first-hand. The Social Impact Award gives young people beyond the SINA communities a way to explore social entrepreneurship and develop early-stage ideas into enterprises through training, incubation, mentoring and peer support.
SINA has run the award in Uganda since 2018 and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2021. In 2024, we expanded the programme across East Africa, bringing together English- and French-speaking clusters. In 2026, we implemented an edition in Zambia for the first time. This year’s finalists took on very urgent challenges, from growing nutritious food in refugee camps, making communication more accessible for Deaf people, and finding alternatives to charcoal amid rising fuel prices.
East Africa: six finalists from two language clusters
The finalists represented Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
Kakuma Green Solutions took first place and €1,000. The youth refugee-led team uses climate-smart agriculture to grow vegetables in the refugee community and works with women vendors who sell them to households.
Sound of Silence won second place and €500 with its Deaf Access App, which aims to make communication more accessible for Deaf people.
Both teams will also join a trip to the Social Impact Award Summit in Podgorica, Montenegro, on 24–27 November 2026. The other finalists were:
- Counting the Tidde: teaching children to count through traditional knowledge of tides, fishing and seasons.
- Wilma Biotechnology: proposing a waste-management system that turns waste into products such as fertiliser, biogas and bioethanol.
- Agro Solution
- Rema Company
Congratulations to all six teams for developing their ideas and sharing them with the jury and one another.
Zambia: Nyamuka hosts its first Social Impact Award
The first SIA edition implemented by SINA in Zambia was hosted by Nyamuka Social Innovation Academy, SINA’s community in Lusaka, in partnership with Circus Zambia.
Two teams received awards for their clean-cooking solutions. Kwado Energy makes locally produced bioethanol gel fuel as an alternative to charcoal. AgriFuel Green Energy turns agricultural crop waste, including discarded maize cobs, into cooking briquettes. Each team receives €1,000 to formalise, implement and grow its social enterprise, along with a place at the Social Impact Award Summit in Montenegro.
Smart Soil Solutions emerged as the community voting winner with over 1.000 votes and wins € 500 for developing soil tests and digital field maps to help farmers identify nutrient and pH problems and make better-informed decisions about inputs.
The other Zambia finalists were:
- Strong Buddies — connecting children living with chronic illness to learning resources, peer connections and developmental support through a digital platform and in-person workshops.
- Hornbill Story House — helping young people in Matero develop creative skills and access professional equipment, while providing storytelling and digital-media services to organisations.
- SoilSynth — using soil and climate data to create farm-level risk scores that can help financial institutions assess smallholder farmers for financing.
- LAMS — helping collateral-based micro-lenders manage loans and sell defaulted collateral through an online storefront.
- EMO — using property-verification technology to help address fraud in property listings and connect people seeking housing with owners.
Congratulations to Kwado Energy Limited and AgriFuel Green Energy, and to all the finalists who put their ideas and work before the jury.
The Zambia programme was made possible with support from Lufthansa’s help alliance and the Leopold Bachmann Foundation. In East Africa the award was made possible by the Merck Family Foundation. We are grateful to the supporters and also thank all the judges and SINA members behind running SIA across eight countries!