Today, the Social Innovation Academy is a growing ecosystem of SINA Communities, young changemakers, refugee-led and youth-led social enterprises, and local solutions emerging from lived experience.

Many people have asked how they can stay updated in a world where social media gets flooded these days by AI generated content and it is harder and harder to be seen. So we have started the SINA Newsletter. It will go out quarterly and share:

– stories from SINA scholars and founders
– updates from new SINA Communities
– milestones from across the ecosystem
– opportunities to engage, partner, mentor, or support

The first edition is now open for subscription. If you would like to follow the journey more closely, you can subscribe here

Thank you to everyone who has been part of SINA’s journey in different ways over the years. This newsletter is also a way to keep the wider community connected to what is emerging.

The post Sign up to our New SINA Newsletter appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

Behind these numbers are people who refused to stay stuck in systems that had no place for them. The report follows what happened across the movement, when the people closest to the problems are becoming the change they wish to see, from refugee settlements to urban communities, and shows how the SINA Framework keeps turning local challenges into livelihoods, enterprises, and new possibilities.

Have a look at the full report and see what communities can build when they lead the change themselves. A big thank you to all our partners, supporters, SINA Communities, SINA Social Enterprises and scholars!

The post Impact Report 2025 appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

There is something strange about the way many systems deal with young people in crisis. Often, the people furthest from the challenges design the answers. The curriculum usually arrives from somewhere else. Funding follows its own logic, often written for people who have never set foot in a refugee settlement or sat with someone who has spent years being told they are useless. We went another way.

SINA grew from a much simpler and harder idea. The young people who know the pressure first-hand and have the lived experiences of challenges, trauma or conflict create their own solutions. That sounds obvious when written down. It is not how most institutions behave.

Inside a SINA Community, scholars take responsibility early. Sometimes earlier than they want. They facilitate sessions, handle logistics, keep track of money, coordinate outreach, test business ideas, deal with conflict, and learn how to work with others in a self-organized system that can be powerful and exhausting too. Freesponsibility is not soft. Some people love the freedom and then hit a wall when they realize the responsibility is real. Sometimes things fall apart a bit. A role is dropped. A proposal gets stuck. Someone leaves. Then people regroup and keep going. That is part of the learning as well.

Joan Nalubega is one of the clearest examples of why this matters. Her enterprise began with Malaria. She had suffered from it as an orphan, and later she started looking at why people were still getting sick even when they were sleeping under mosquito nets. That pushed her into conversations with scientists, health professionals, and people in the communities most affected. Eventually she developed mosquito-repellent soap through Uganics and is saving lives through prevention.

However, a good idea is not the same as a workable one. The soap risked costing too much for the families who needed it most. So Joan had to find another way, selling at regular price in the tourism industry and using that income to subsidize distribution in lower-income communities. Then supply problems hit. Raw materials were unreliable. She adjusted again and started building a local supply chain with women in agriculture, training them to grow and process the herbs and flowers needed for the oils. Before that, some of those women were earning barely $10 a month. Later they were earning $150 or more.

That story feels very familiar at SINA. Someone starts with lived experience, runs into reality, changes the model, runs into another wall, changes it again, and eventually something solid emerges and becomes a social enterprise. The process is messy, not linear.

Rebecca Aimee knew what it meant to be a refugee woman trying to survive through petty trade and still being locked out of even the smallest loan. Patapia came out of that. It started by backing refugee women to build small businesses, and later grew much further. Janet Aguti was raped as a child. Later, she built Totya Platform to support survivors of sexual violence with medical, legal, and psychological care.

Janet Aguti meeting the Pope in the Vatican as part of a survivor delegation advocating for a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual violence in the church. Copyright by Vatican Media


What SINA trusts is not a category called “beneficiaries.” We trust people. Their read of a problem. Their instinct for what is missing. Their ability to build something from a place that outsiders usually misunderstand. The best person to create a solution for e.g. street children is someone who was a street child herself, not a PhD in psychology. There are skills and experiences one cannot learn in school or university.

That also shapes how SINA grows. SINA Communities are independently and locally registered, self-organized, and linked through the SINA Framework and a wider ecosystem that keeps learning, arguing, adapting, and replicating. The communities are for the local people, by the local people. New communities grow because people who have lived the model decide to carry it into another place and make it work there. Today there are 23 SINA Communities in 9 countries. Across the ecosystem, they have helped build more than 150 social enterprises and created around 2,000 jobs, while alumni earn around three times more than a comparable control group.

A young person who was dismissed as a dropout, a burden, a case to manage, or someone to pity starts running a training, negotiating with suppliers, guiding a meeting, testing prices, helping a team through conflict, mentoring the next scholar and becoming a social entrepreneur. That shift is where a lot of the real change sits. You can feel it in a room before you can measure it in a spreadsheet. And once you have seen that happen a few times, it becomes very hard to go back to systems that keep the keys so far from the people who need to use them.

The post At SINA, young people facing the challenges create the solutions appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

The month opened with our Social Enterprise Bootcamp in Mpigi, and it was intense in the best way. This was not entrepreneurship as theory. People joined real early-stage SINA social enterprise teams, worked directly with customers, questioned assumptions, adjusted their offers, and pushed toward problem-solution fit, prototypes, pricing, and first revenues. What made it even stronger was the mix of people in the room, with participants from many different SINA Communities and 12 countries across four continents.

For the first time, we also welcomed individual international participants from the UK, Germany, Italy, the USA, and South Africa. Each joined one social enterprise team for the week and became part of the real work behind testing ideas and shaping growth. Their reflections captured that well. Esra Kucukciftci called it “work worth doing” and praised the founders’ “unparalleled market wisdom.” Bex Hewett described the week as “life changing” and wrote that seeing SINA in practice “changed my perspective entirely.” We will have a similar bootcamp coming up in June.

Then Mpigi filled up again for Impact Week Uganda 2026 at Jangu International. From March 4 to 12, with the Train-the-Coach phase followed by the challenge week, Impact Week brought together participants from 16 countries. The programme set out to equip 24 local and international Junior Coaches and 75 young challenge participants with Design Thinking skills to work on real community challenges. This diversity brought high quality to the week. Different backgrounds, different instincts, different ways of asking questions, and suddenly the learning goes deeper because nobody is coming from exactly the same place.

Also in March, the SINA Global team, made up of 14 members from different SINA Communities and replicators and Nomads, met in Jinja for a retreat. Some of the most important work in a growing movement is quiet work, the kind that does not make for many photos but shapes everything that comes next. We used the time to reflect honestly on what SINA needs now: stronger shared systems, strong human connection between the 23 locations across 9 countries, better documentation, clearer learning loops across communities, and more financial resilience so the ecosystem can keep growing.

And then Zambia started. Our newest SINA Community in Lusaka began with its pioneer scholars on March 30th after an intensive replication journey, and it builds on the partnership with Circus Zambia.

The post A Strong Month of March Across the SINA Ecosystem appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

An experienced SINA Nomad, Confidence Akampurira, who already supported the startup phase of SINA in Nigeria in 2025, joined on ground in January. The initial pioneer scholars started the first personal development phase of the SINA Framework yesterday. We are grateful for the support of the Lufthansa help alliance and the Leopold Bachmann Foundation for the support, making this possible.

The youth will now go through three months of deep personal development, self-discovery, and mindset shift. During this phase, they will work on overcoming limiting beliefs, building confidence, identifying their purpose, and strengthening the character and inner foundation needed to become changemakers. From there, they will gradually step into practical roles within the new SINA Community, take responsibility for real tasks, learn by doing, and co-create a self-organized learning space together. Over time, they will develop the skills, experiences, and ownership needed to support other young people locally and to turn challenges in their communities into solutions and social enterprises, which create jobs also for others.

The post New SINA Community Starts in Lusaka, Zambia appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

We bring together 8 – 10 early-stage social enterprises from different SINA communities (from Uganda and other African countries). Each enterprise already has a clear social or environmental problem they solve and a working solution. The bootcamp is the week where the enterprise accelerates and scales its impact. Teams work hands-on through business diagnostics, financial forecasting, business model design and lots of practical and fun activities. It all ends with a final pitch vent to an external panel of judges.

Dates and flow

• Location: Mpigi, Uganda at our main SINA Community “Jangu International”
• Arrival: Sunday, June 14 (anytime), the airport is “Entebbe”, 90 minutes from Mpigi
• Bootcamp:  June 15 (8:30 am start) to Friday 19 June (full days)
• Saturday/ Sunday June 20 -21: departure or optional visits nearby: e.g. established SINA enterprises, the Equator, primary forest, birdwatching on Lake Victoria

Your role as an international participant
You’re in the team. You help with customer conversations, shaping the offer, prototyping, testing pricing, doing the uncomfortable learning loops, and supporting the team to move fast. Evenings are informal and relational, the days are very practical.

We’re aiming for 8 internationals with diverse backgrounds and skills, one per enterprise team, so spots are limited.

Cost and what’s included
Participation fee: 575 € (670 USD)

It covers (simple but comfortable) accommodation, full board at SINA Village in Mpigi and airport pickup and drop-off. It further helps to cover local operations and travel for teams coming from other SINA communities. Flights, visas, insurance, and personal travel costs are not included

Testimonies from previous participants:
– Bex (UK)
– Esra (USA)

How to join:
Email etienne@socialinnovationacademy.org and confirm your interest without needing to commit. We’ll set a call to walk you through the details, answer questions, and confirm your spot. See you in Uganda!

Your SINA Team

Here the information again in a flyer form

The post Join Our Social Enterprise Acceleration Bootcamp June 14 – 19, 2026 in Uganda appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

The paper looks at how place-based and experiential learning can support creative problem-solving, collaboration across cultures, and the development of social innovation projects. It also reflects honestly on challenges such as communication across contexts and complex group dynamics, which makes it a thoughtful contribution to the wider conversation on design education and learning in real-world settings.

The paper is based on a longer collaboration that brought design students from Pakistan to Uganda in two early phases, first in December 2017 and then again from June to July 2018, each time with a new group of students learning alongside SINA scholars in Mpigi. A third phase followed in 2019 at SINA, this time bringing together students from Pakistan and Nigeria, which gave the project a broader cross-cultural dimension and helped shape the reflections presented in the paper.

Read the full paper at:

https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1583&context=learnxdesign

The post New Academic Paper Explores Place-based Learning in Partnership with SINA appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

That changes something deep. A young person who has been told to wait, to fit in, or to lower their expectations begins to see that they can create work, lead others, and solve real problems in their community. That is where hope becomes concrete and shaping a prosperous future. Across 23 SINA Communities, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have gone on to build more than 130 social enterprises and create over 2,000 jobs. Those numbers matter, but they are only part of the story. What they really point to is a different way of learning, one that treats young people as capable from the beginning and finding their purpose in line and taking action to live out the purpose, regardless if they start their own social enterprise or not.

Read the full article here: https://hundred.org/en/articles/youth-need-hope-and-control-over-their-own-education

We are grateful to HundrED for recognizing SINA also under the Global 100 Collection of 2026 and for helping bring more attention to education models that trust youth with real ownership.

The post HundrED highlights SINA’s youth-led approach to education appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

Starting in June 2026 with a 6 months learning journey in Uganda and in January 2027, we will open SINA in Berlin, a self-organised learning and entrepreneurship community for disadvantaged young people in Berlin, joining our growing movement of currently 23+ SINA Communities. It is a big step for us, because it brings the SINA Framework into a German context with all the opportunity, diversity, and difficulties.

Right now, we are looking for two Community Starters, also called Replicators or “Changemaker-Makers”. They will co-found SINA Berlin from the inside. This is not a typical job, see below and help us spread the word.

SINA Berlin – Ausschreibung für Changemaker-Makers (German)

SINA Berlin – Call for Changemaker-makers (English)

The post SINA Is Starting a Community in Germany – Call for Replicators (“Changemaker-Makers”) appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).

The bootcamp brings together 7 to 8 early-stage social enterprises from SINA communities in Uganda and other African countries. Participation is limited to a small cohort of internationals to ensure depth of experience and close collaboration. A few spots are still available. Participation closes once the cohort is complete. Reach out to etienne@socialinnovationacademy.org, if you wish to secure your spot. All details below:

The post SINA Social Enterprise Bootcamp, Uganda (February 24 to March 3, 2026) appeared first on SINA (Social Innovation Academy).