Patrick Muvunga Trickpa, Turatsinze Mafigi Victor and Raphael Muvunga had come to SINA in Mpigi after living for five years in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in western Uganda. Around nine months into their journey, they wanted to know: if SINA scholars were encouraged to create their own social enterprises, could they start a SINA in Nakivale?

At the time, there was only one SINA community with Jangu International, where everything started from. We had no replication manual, no established process and no experience of supporting another SINA community to start. But Patrick, Victor and Raphael knew the place they wanted to return to and the people they wanted to work alongside. We decided to figure it out together.

Now, ten years later, OPPORTUNIGEE is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Its story is also the story of how SINA began to grow beyond its first home.

Patrick and Raphael had fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and found refuge in Nakivale. Like many young people living in the settlement, they faced an uncertain future and limited access to education and work. When they returned to Nakivale with Victor, the beginnings of OPPORTUNIGEE were a little clandestine. On a small piece of land allocated to Patrick and Raphael, we started building the first bottle house. Plastic bottles became part of the construction, and the building became a place where the first pioneer scholars could come together. Under the roof, the ceiling became a small room with matrasses were Patrick and Raphael slept.

SINA founder Etienne also sometimes spend a few weeks in Nakivale in 2016 and along came also Abhijit Sinha from Project DEFY. They had just replicated something similar in India with their “nooks” and brought in his wisdom and on ground support. Patrick, Victor and Raphael brought the SINA experience with them, but they had to work out what it would mean in Nakivale. They began inviting young people from the settlement to discover their strengths, take responsibility for the community and develop ideas for social enterprises.

By the end of 2016, the first scholars were already coming together regularly. In an early update, we wrote about OPPORTUNIGEE as the first place where scholars were putting the SINA model into practice beyond Mpigi. At that point, we could see something taking shape, although we did not yet know where it would lead.

A community begins to take shape

The first bottle house was only a beginning. OPPORTUNIGEE grew as its scholars and founders made the space their own and started responding to challenges they knew from daily life in Nakivale. The early projects took different forms. Scholars explored beekeeping, made shoes from used car tyres and worked on crafts. They also made a short film about life in the settlement and their new learning community. Looking back at it today offers a glimpse of OPPORTUNIGEE close to its beginnings, when the first scholars were building a space that they themselves would run.

Watch the early video: OPPORTUNIGEE on YouTube

Social enterprises also began to emerge. Among them Tucheke Movies. The community created spaces for people to meet, perform and share their talents. In 2017, OPPORTUNIGEE began developing a public gathering space and an amphitheatre. A stage at the community hosted theatre, art and cultural events, bringing together people from different backgrounds living in Nakivale.

From one community to many

OPPORTUNIGEE changed how we understood SINA’s future. Until then, we knew what scholars were creating in Mpigi. Patrick, Victor and Raphael showed that the SINA Framework could also be taken to another place, shaped by people who knew that place and led by the community itself. The experience raised new questions for us: What should remain at the heart of SINA? What should each community be free to adapt? How could communities learn from one another while finding their own way?

There were no complete answers at the start. We learned through trying, making mistakes and seeing what scholars and communities created. In Nakivale, demand grew and another community, Unleashed, later emerged as OPPORTUNIGEE split and Victor wanted the freedom to create his own. In 2018, another SINA began with SINA Loketa in the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in northern Uganda, an early step in a journey that has since brought SINA Communities to different countries and contexts. Each has its own people, name, history and challenges. OPPORTUNIGEE was the first to show what could be possible.

A journey with changes along the way

Ten years do not follow a straight line. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions interrupted OPPORTUNIGEE’s implementation of the SINA Framework. The community went on to focus on other initiatives, including work on a new village for families arriving in Nakivale and they also found another partner with the Promise Hub. Across those years, OPPORTUNIGEE has continued to be a place where people in Nakivale come together to learn, create and build. Its story includes the founders who asked the first question, the pioneer scholars who joined them, and many more people who have contributed their ideas and work since.

Thank you for ten years

To Patrick, Victor and Raphael: thank you for asking a question we had not yet thought to ask ourselves.

To the pioneer scholars and everyone who has been part of OPPORTUNIGEE over the past decade: congratulations on ten years. You have built far more than we could have imagined when the first bottle house was taking shape. And to everyone who has supported OPPORTUNIGEE along the way: thank you for being part of its journey.

Happy 10th anniversary, OPPORTUNIGEE!

The post It Started With a Question: Celebrating 10 Years of OPPORTUNIGEE appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

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 produces and innovative organic fertilizer from cow dung mixed with rabbit urine for rural farmers, aiming to tackle poverty and hunger.
• Rema Company raises poultry in rural Burundi to improve food security.

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!

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Viola Nakadama: turning organic waste into livestock nutrition

Viola, co-founder of Nutricycle Farm Uganda from Kiira Innovation Academy, received the Girl Earth Award.

For smallholder livestock farmers, the cost of animal feed can leave little income to support their households or reinvest in their farms. At the same time, markets, restaurants and households discard organic material that could be put to use.

Viola and her team use black soldier fly larvae to convert organic waste into nutrient-rich inputs for animal feed in a liquid form. They also produce feed boosters designed to be mixed with locally available feeds, helping farmers improve their animals’ nutrition without relying entirely on expensive commercial products.

Their enterprise connects waste management with a practical farming need: making livestock feed more affordable. The Girl Earth Award recognises Viola’s contribution to environmental action through this work.

Sandra Peace Naluzze: developing Clearmorn Uganda

Sandra, co-founder of Clearmorn Uganda from Jangu International, received the Girl Innovation Award.

With her team, Sandra has developed a non-alcoholic drink made from natural ingredients, designed to help relieve hangover symptoms and address the disruption they cause to everyday activities and work. Building Clearmorn involves developing the product and finding its place in the market, with the team participating in enterprise development and pitching activities at Jangu.

Alongside her entrepreneurial work, Sandra advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights and youth empowerment.

About the Girl Champion Awards

Uganda’s National Girl Champion Awards recognise girls and young women contributing to their communities through innovation, environmental action, education, advocacy and leadership.

The awards are organised by the Kaleke Kasome Foundation with civil society partners under the patronage of Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development. Nile Girls Forum, a young women-led organisation working on education, health, leadership and peacebuilding, is the announced host for 2026. The initiative also offers mentorship, life skills and business training to help participants develop their work further.

Read more about the 2026 awards and their organisers.

For us at SINA, celebrating Viola and Sandra also means recognising the teams and communities building these enterprises with them. Through the SINA Framework, scholars explore challenges they care about, test possible solutions and take responsibility for developing their ideas with others.

Congratulations, Viola and Sandra, and to your teams at Nutricycle and Clearmorn!
We are proud to share this moment with you.

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This question runs through the second issue of Designing for Freedom, an independent magazine by Tine Bieber. We are featured in the article “Scaling What Cannot Be Standardized,” based on her conversation with Philipp Mäntele, Systems Steward at SINA.

The detailed article explores a question we keep returning to in our work. As more SINA Communities emerge, how do we share what we have learned while leaving each community room to find its own answers?

Through the SINA Framework, young people take real roles, govern their communities and create social enterprises from challenges they know firsthand. Carrying that responsibility takes practice. A role can give someone authority over a budget, but learning to hold that responsibility involves difficult decisions, mistakes and people willing to work through them together.

Tine’s article examines how learning travels between communities, and how our structures can help us respond when lived experience challenges what we thought would work. Philipp describes this practice as Sense, Act, Surrender: pay attention to what is happening, act on what we can understand, and remain willing to let go of an explanation or plan that no longer fits.

The conversation also reaches into the purpose of our social enterprises. Through Totya Platform, founded by Janet Aguti to support survivors of sexual violence in Uganda, it asks what would need to change for an organisation to become unnecessary. Could the surrounding community develop the capacity to carry the work itself?

For us, this question belongs in any discussion of scale. We want more people and communities to become able to shape their own futures, support others and build without waiting for SINA to provide the next answer.

Thank you, Tine, for making room for the difficult questions behind our growth.

Find the SINA feature on pages 15–19:

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Ten social enterprises from our ecosystem were nominated this year. For us at SINA, Uganics’ recognition is a particular reason to celebrate. Joan started the social enterprise while at SINA in 2016, and the responsibility she experienced here has helped shape how she runs it. Corporate Rebels, which researched and submitted the nominations, documented what that looks like when a decision goes wrong.

After visiting a manufacturer in Germany, Joan brought home an idea for equipment to cut soap. Her production team and Operations Manager preferred a different design, developed with a local fabricator. The decision fell within their responsibilities, so she let it stand. The machine damaged the soap and broke its own knives. The company had spent significant money building it.

Joan did not take the decision back. The team researched alternatives and visited other factories, eventually developing equipment that processes more product than the German design she had proposed. They remained responsible through the failure and its repair. That is a demanding form of trust. That is a demanding form of trust. The financial loss was real, but the team kept the opportunity to develop its own judgment. Had Joan stepped in and solved the problem herself, the machine might still have been fixed, but the people responsible would have lost the chance to work out how.

Uganics makes mosquito-repellent soaps and other household products, with higher-margin sales to tourism businesses and wealthier customers helping keep products affordable for low-income families where the soap is needed the most to fight against Malaria. Listening to those families has changed the products themselves. When mothers liked a mosquito-repellent petroleum jelly but could not afford a 100-gram container, the team introduced a 30-gram version.

These decisions help explain the connection between the two awards. Within our 24 SINA Communities, young people take responsibility for work that others depend on. A scholar manages the food budget. Another handles procurement and has to account for a missing receipt. The community feels the consequences when something goes wrong.

For young people accustomed to being treated as recipients of aid or excluded by formal education, having that authority can be unfamiliar. We call the relationship between freedom and responsibility “freesponsibility.” It requires clear roles and access to information, with room to develop judgment through doing the work. The question is whether people become more capable of making decisions themselves.

Uganics has taken that practice into its own circumstances. Joan describes a gradual shift away from a business where employees waited for her approval. Today, she can go months without visiting the factory while the team adjusts production and improves processes. Strategy and major financial commitments still depend on her. Sharing responsibility remains work in progress.

SINA co-founder Philipp Mäntele travelled to Qingdao in China to accept the award on SINA’a behalf. Unfortunately, visa difficulties prevented participants from Uganda from attending.

The ZeroDX Awards were introduced by the Business Ecosystem Alliance and draw on Haier’s concept of “Zero Distance,” reducing the separation between an organisation and the people it serves. The Benchmark Innovators category recognises organisations establishing examples of how management can work differently. Emergent Excellence honours organisations developing and putting such changes into practice.

Our first award and visit to Haier in 2024 prompted further examination of our own approach. SINA already distributed authority, but we began asking more closely whom each role served and how its contribution could be assessed. That learning continues as we develop ways to earn income while remaining accountable to the communities for whom the work exists.

For Philipp, this year’s gathering also connected to a book he is writing, drawing on twelve years of experience with SINA. It explores how work can develop people’s capacity to contribute, and how organisations can get in the way. Meeting others working through similar questions offered an opportunity to challenge and deepen that thinking.

Congratulations to the whole Uganics team, and to everyone across our SINA Communities whose daily work has earned this recognition for the third year running.

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SINA is grateful that Etienne Salborn has been included in the Leaders50 again, following the 2024 edition and now the 2026 edition. The recognition is meaningful because of the selection process. Leaders50 honorees are nominated exclusively by people whose own work shapes how leadership is understood. To see SINA’s work recognised alongside leaders such as Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, and Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen is an important moment for the wider SINA ecosystem.

For us, the recognition is not mainly about the person who started SINA. It is about a different understanding of leadership. In many aid and education systems, young people from difficult backgrounds are still treated as beneficiaries to be helped. Decisions are made for them. Money is controlled somewhere else. Their realities are discussed in rooms they are not part of. SINA exists to interrupt that pattern.

Across SINA Communities, young people take real roles and co-own and co-run SINA Communities. They do not learn about responsibility, they practice it. Even if this is sometimes uncomfortable. A SINA member may make a decision that others would not have made. It may create tension. It may turn out to be a mistake. In those moments, leadership is not about taking control back. It is about making the information visible enough for responsibility to grow.

In its assessment, Thinkers50 describes Etienne’s leadership as marked by a “deep commitment to trust and self-management” and highlights his belief that communities thrive when they have ownership over their futures.

For us, this has a practical meaning. We hold real authority in our roles, answer to each other for our decisions and help others grow into responsibilities we once found difficult ourselves. Former scholars now lead SINA Communities and support others to build social enterprises. This is how the leadership recognised in Etienne continues to develop across SINA.

With it, trust is not the absence of boundaries. Harm needs intervention. Money needs accountability. In SINA, young people are trusted with responsibility before they feel fully ready for it. This is how they grow. We call this principle freesponsibility. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. When someone is given real freedom in a role, they also carry responsibility for what happens next. If every important decision still needs to come back to one founder, one manager, or one office, then the SINA Framework has not gone far enough. SINA is increasingly held by people and communities living it. We are doing things differently. That is the point.

Today, we are a growing ecosystem of 24 SINA Communities across 10 countries. We have created around 160 social enterprises and over 2,000 jobs. About 1,000 of us are currently shaping SINA every day by holding roles, making decisions, repairing what breaks, and creating solutions from problems we know closely.

This recognition through Thinkers50 points to that wider work. It belongs to all the scholars, facilitators, community members, coaches, founders of social enterprises, replication teams, and partners across SINA who keep making this kind of leadership real.

We are grateful to the nominators, to Thinkers50, and to everyone across the ecosystem who continues to show what leadership can become when responsibility is shared.

View the full list of Leaders50 honorees here:
https://thinkers50.com/leaders50/

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These are different assignments and they have something important in common. They all happened in the last 12 months and the people invited to contribute had done the work themselves and are SINA Experts. We are now making this experience easier to find and engage through the SINA Expert Network.

Bringing Ugandan Experience into a Design Process

For a shower-design project described by PHOENIX Design, Mary Apolot coordinated a six-person Ugandan research team, including Franco Lemi from Bidibidi Refugee Settlement. Through household interviews and design workshops, they brought direct knowledge from Ugandan communities into the process before the key decisions had been made. Mary later shared SINA’s approach to testing ideas with PHOENIX Design in Stuttgart.

Read the full story from the PHOENIX Design →

When a High School Dropout Trains University Lecturers

In August 2026, SINA alumni Jesca Nayebare and Charles Busuulwa facilitated sessions with lecturers at Kampala International University on moving from teaching entrepreneurship to helping students practise it. Jesca drew on her experience of building FarmPlus, showing how an idea develops through conversations with customers, testing and adjustment rather than academic theory alone.

Read the full story of Jesca training university lecturers →

Working with six Organizations at the Suyana Learning Exchange

At a Suyana Foundation partner learning exchange in Lira (Uganda), three SINA facilitators worked with six NGOs from Uganda and Rwanda. They explored how purpose and shared responsibility could strengthen their organizations, then developed income ideas based on what they already did well. Rather than polishing plans on paper, participants prepared to test their assumptions with the people concerned, followed by mentoring through July.

Read Suyana Foundation’s account of the Learning Exchange →

Expertise built through doing

Across SINA, people run self-organized Communities, build social enterprises and support others through the same difficult process. They manage budgets and facilitate teams. They carry the SINA Framework into refugee settlements, cities and new countries. Some bring lived knowledge of displacement, agriculture, health or particular markets. Others have years of practice in social entrepreneurship, freesponsibility, facilitation and organizational self-management.

Until now, much of this expertise travelled through personal relationships and individual invitations. Someone knew Mary. Someone had worked with a SINA facilitator before. Someone had heard Jesca’s story. The SINA Expert Network gives this a clearer doorway.

An organization can bring us a challenge without already knowing whom it needs. We can connect it with one person for an expert conversation or bring together a team for research, facilitation, advisory work or a longer engagement.

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The ZeroDX Awards recognize organizations working to reduce the distance between the people doing the work and the people they serve. In practice, this means that the people closest to a problem have the authority to respond. They do not need to push every decision through a long hierarchy or wait for instructions from the top. They can act, learn and adjust while remaining accountable for the result. It can sound rather technical. For us, it means something simple: the people who understand or live a problem should should have the freedom to act, take responsibility and create their own solutions. At SINA, we call this “Freesponsibility“.

This does not mean having no structure. It means building a different kind of structure with clear roles, access to information, shared purpose and the freedom to make decisions where the relevant knowledge sits.

The ten nominated enterprises work on very different challenges: from Malaria and maternal healthcare to safe water, regenerative agriculture, clean cooking and circular fashion. What connects them is that their solutions emerged close to the problems themselves and are being shaped by teams with real responsibility. Here they are, what they do and an example of Zero Distance from each:

• Babykit makes affordable infant warmers in the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda; its production team can begin large orders without senior approval.
• EverGrow Organics supplies organic farm inputs; two Gulu agents overturned a leadership decision to close their hub, which is now profitable.
• FarmPlus Uganda converts waste into animal feed and fertilizer; a production lead turned insect-farming residue into a new fertilizer product.
• Gejja Women Foundation tackles menstrual poverty; its team rejected a lucrative disposable-pad order that conflicted with its environmental mission.
• Generous Designs Africa turns refugee-settlement waste into products; community members now help shape and run its recycling system.
• Green at Mind produces clean cookstoves in the Kakuma Refigee Settlement in Kenya; its current stove was developed by the field team and adopted without top-down approval.
• Infants’ Health Foundation brings healthcare to remote villages; local volunteers decide which communities and locations are hardest to reach.
• Kimuli Collections turns waste into fashion and jobs for people with disabilities; deaf tailors now lead product development.
• Tusafishe installs affordable water systems; a new plumber and local teacher redesigned the system now used across its projects.
• Uganics Repellents makes affordable malaria-prevention products; its production team retained responsibility after a costly mistake and developed a better solution.

Their work makes “Zero Distance” tangible. These are not identical organizational models, nor are any of them finished. Self-organization is an ongoing practice. It requires teams to keep learning how to distribute authority without losing accountability, and how to stay close to the communities and customers for whom they exist.

SINA was never designed to give young people business ideas or prepare them to follow somebody else’s plan. SINA Communities create the conditions for people to take on real roles, make consequential decisions and turn challenges they have experienced into social enterprises of their own.

The nominations suggest that the way of working developed within SINA Communities is travelling into new contexts. People are taking freedom, responsibility and closeness to users with them and adapting these principles to their own enterprises. That is the kind of scale we believe in: not one organization becoming ever larger, but impact spreading through people, enterprises and communities.

Congratulations to every nominated team. We are proud to be part of this movement with you!

We thank Corporate Rebels for researching the enterprises and submitting the nominations, and the Haier Model Institute, Business Ecosystem Alliance and Haier for recognizing organizations that are rethinking how work can be organized. The winners will be announced on 21st September 2026 in Qingdao, China and we have a good feeling SINA can wit it for the 3rd time in a row and there will also be SINA social enterprises among the winners.

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She is 24 years old, a SINA alumna, and co-founder of FarmPlus. In the language many institutions still use to sort people, she is a high school dropout. Her formal education ended early. But the learning did not stop there. At SINA, she overcame the label and limiting believes and learned by building. At SINA, Jesca did not learn entrepreneurship as a chapter in a course. She learned it while building FarmPlus. Finding out what farmers actually needed. Testing whether her livestock feed idea could work. Explaining it to people who had no reason to believe her yet. Adjusting when something was unclear, too expensive, or not useful enough. That kind of learning gives someone a different authority in the room.

This is why Kampala International University (KIU) invited her. In August 2026, Jesca and Charles Busuulwa, another SINA alumnus and social enterprise co-founder of She Deserves, facilitated core sessions at the three-day Training of Trainers with KIU lecturers. The training asked a question that many universities are now facing with increasing urgency: How do we move from teaching entrepreneurship to helping students actually become entrepreneurs?

For SINA, this is our daily work. We work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have often been pushed out of formal education, employment, and the places where decisions are made. Some have been told directly or indirectly that they are behind, unqualified, difficult, or a burden. In many aid systems, they are expected to receive. In many education systems, they are expected to first prove themselves on paper before they are trusted with responsibility.

SINA works from another starting point. We give responsibility early. Scholars run their SINA Communities. They manage food, money, trainings, logistics, marketing, conflicts, and the small pieces of daily life that become very real when a community depends on them. A missed budget line can mean there is not enough for lunch for everyone. This is not clean learning and SINA scholars set their own curriculum based on the roles they choose which help them get to where they want to be in the future and gain the skills and experiences needed to build a social enterprise later.

Often scholars arrive with fear, habits of survival, and wounds that do not disappear because a program begins. Some ideas fail after weeks of effort. Some teams form and fall apart. And still, this is where leadership starts. In SINA, young people do not wait until someone declares them ready. They take roles, make decisions, face consequences, and learn how to repair when things go wrong. Over time, the same person who once sat quietly in a session may facilitate the next cohort. The one who was afraid to speak may become the person holding a team through a difficult decision. The scholar becomes a trainer. The trainer becomes a founder. The founder becomes someone others can learn from.

Jesca brought that reality into KIU. During the training, she shared the journey of FarmPlus and the practical steps of moving from a problem to a tested solution. One participant reflected that her presentation on livestock feed helped him see how his own ideas could become possible. He had been carrying them in his mind, but did not know how to bring them out. After seeing the early stages, the confusion, and the practical steps, the distance between idea and action became smaller. This is what practice can do inside education.

Professor Regina, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation, Consultancy and Extension at Kampala International University, connected the training to Uganda’s wider shift away from rote learning and towards competency-based education. Her reflection was clear: people can learn, but they also need to practice. Entrepreneurship does not begin with titles. It begins with identifying a problem and making a serious effort to solve it.

That is why this moment matters beyond one workshop. In June 2026, SINA and Kampala International University signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on research, documentation, experiential learning, competency-based education, mentorship, internships, and social innovation. The agreement also opens space for SINA practitioners to contribute as guest facilitators, visiting lecturers, and co-supervisors for student projects. The Training of Trainers was one of the first visible steps.

More will come from this partnership. We are exploring how the SINA Framework can support KIU and other institutions to make entrepreneurship education more practical, more connected to real problems, and more honest about what it takes to build. We are also open to further engagements with universities, training institutions, NGOs, government bodies, and partners who want to experience or adapt parts of the SINA Framework. This can happen online or in person through guest sessions, Training of Trainers programs, immersion visits to SINA Communities, research collaboration, or deeper institutional partnerships.

Reach out at info@socialinnovationacademy.org to talk further or subscribe to our newsletter to get quarterly updates.

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Then, while going through the SINA Framework at Jangu International, something shifted. Instead of seeing this only as something painful that had happened to her, Jackline was challenged to ask a different question: Could the problem itself become an opportunity? That question eventually became She Deserves Uganda.

The first idea was a warming belt. It was too expensive for the girls they wanted to reach. So they dropped it. Jackline and her team went back to the girls and asked what they actually needed. Something affordable. Non-invasive. Something that could work quickly. They experimented again and developed a natural cramp-relief oil. Then around 100 products from the first batch sold in a single day. There was demand and there was still much more to figure out.

She Deserves has since continued working on menstrual pain, menstrual health information and the stigma surrounding periods. Jackline also deliberately brings boys into the conversation. They are brothers, classmates and future fathers. Menstruation should not remain something they know nothing about.

In 2024, Jackline was selected as an Anzisha Fellow, joining some of Africa’s youngest entrepreneurs in a two-year journey of growing themselves and their ventures. She has now reached the end of that fellowship, and Anzisha returned to Uganda to capture her story in this documentary.

Jackline is far from the only SINA entrepreneur to have gone through Anzisha. Over the years, 12 young social entrepreneurs emerging from SINA Communities have been selected as Anzisha Fellows. Four joined the fellowship in 2026 alone.

That relationship has grown over time. After repeatedly encountering young entrepreneurs coming out of SINA, Anzisha started looking more closely at what was happening behind them. In 2024, they published a case study on the SINA approach, invited SINA to present at the African Leadership Festival and today SINA is an important referral partner for young social entrepreneurs entering the Anzisha ecosystem.

For us, that matters. The aim is not to produce people who become good at applying for fellowships. It is to create an environment where young people who have often been denied opportunities can discover what they are capable of, take responsibility and turn the problems around them into social enterprises. Recognition can come later.

Jackline puts the more important part simply in the video: “I believe in what I’m doing and I believe my project is addressing the actual problem that people are facing in the community.”

Her story starts at 7:06 in the Anzisha documentary A Stigma of Presence:

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