Bring us your challenge.
We help find the right experience.
The people closest to a challenge are often furthest from the decisions about it. The SINA Expert Network connects organizations with people across the SINA ecosystem whose lived knowledge or experience gained through practice is relevant to a real challenge.
SINA Experts include social entrepreneurs, practitioners, facilitators, replicators and people who understand particular contexts from the inside.
How we can work with your challenge
You do not need to know which expert or format you need. Bring us the challenge. We will explore who across SINA can contribute and what form the work should take. Our strongest collaborations begin with a shared intention: to create something useful and allow people closest to the challenge to influence what happens. We explore that fit together during the first conversation.
Understand a local context before decisions are fixed
Household interviews, local-language research, contextual inquiry, and market or user insight carried out by people rooted in the places being studied.
Co-create with people living the challenge
Design workshops, testing assumptions in real settings, and developing products or programmes while there is still room to change them.
Build a self-managed organization
Support with organizational structures, distributed decision-making, conflict facilitation and leadership development. SINA has worked with Holacracy-based structures for more than ten years and is Rendanheyi (RDHY) certified.
Across SINA, more than 200 people bring different skills, lived realities and experience gained through doing the work. We match each challenge with people who understand it from the inside because they live it, work within the context or have relevant experience addressing it. Depending on the need, this could become an expert conversation, research assignment, workshop, product co-creation, coaching process or an ongoing collaboration.
Expertise built through doing
Across SINA, people develop capability through real responsibility by running self-organized Communities, building social enterprises, facilitating teams, managing resources, supporting others and carrying the SINA Framework into new contexts. This creates two kinds of expertise gained from doing the work:
- Lived and contextual expertise
First-hand understanding of particular communities, markets, social or environmental challenges, across more than 10 countries. - Expertise gained through practice
Experience with areas such as self-organization, freesponsibility, personal development, learning through real responsibility, social entrepreneurship, facilitation, local ownership and replication.
Meet some of the people behind the expertise
Across SINA, people have built social enterprises, led self-organized Communities, supported entrepreneurs and worked through challenges firsthand. Here are three examples of the expertise you can access through the SINA Expert Network.
Mary Apolot
Social Enterprise Acceleration & Founder Development
Mary joined SINA as a scholar in 2018. Today, she leads the SINA Acceleration Program, supporting social entrepreneurs from across the ecosystem to strengthen and grow their enterprises.
Her expertise comes from both sides of the journey: developing through real responsibility herself and now helping others navigate the difficult path from an early idea to a functioning social enterprise.
Relevant for:
- Founder development
- Social enterprise acceleration
- Coaching and mentoring
- Learning through responsibility
Joan Nalubega
Social Enterprise Growth & Inclusive Product Innovation
Growing up in a malaria-affected community, Joan experienced the problem her enterprise now addresses. She founded Uganics and developed an affordable mosquito-repellent soap for communities where protection is often inaccessible.
Her experience spans product development, market testing and growing an internationally recognized social enterprise from a challenge she knew firsthand.
Relevant for:
- Social enterprise growth
- Inclusive product development
- Health innovation
- Underserved markets
Franco Lemi
Facilitation, Refugee Contexts & Product Co-Creation
Franco is a refugee and the Empowerment Lead at SINA Loketa in Bidibidi Refugee Settlement. He facilitates personal-development learning, mentors emerging social entrepreneurs and has supported the establishment of another SINA Community in Nigeria.
He contributed contextual knowledge to a shower-design project described publicly by PHOENIX Design, connecting product-development work with the realities of local communities.
Relevant for:
- Refugee & displacement contexts
- Participatory product development
- Facilitation & personal development
What working with a SINA expert can look like
Market Research
Household Interviews
Refugee Contexts
Product Co-creation
For a shower-design project described publicly by PHOENIX Design, Mary Apolot coordinated a locally rooted research team of six people in Uganda. Franco Lemi and five other team members contributed as R&D experts, with Franco focusing particularly on experiences from Bidibidi Refugee Settlement.
Working across several locations, the team conducted household interviews, participated in design workshops and gathered evidence from people familiar with these contexts from the inside. The work brought knowledge from Ugandan households into the design process early. Rather than being asked to react to an already completed idea, local researchers helped investigate how people use water, what constraints they experience and what a useful design would need to take into account.
Mary later travelled to PHOENIX Design in Stuttgart, where she shared how people in SINA develop solutions: by speaking with potential customers, testing ideas in real settings, learning where assumptions are wrong and changing course.
This is one example of what the SINA Expert Network can make possible: bringing together a locally grounded research team whose members understand the communities and contexts being studied. Their lived experience can inform decisions that would otherwise be made at a distance.
Read PHOENIX Design’s account of the collaboration →
Learning across organizations
Since 2024, SINA and Seminaris Hotels have been creating exchanges between Uganda and Germany. Seminaris participants joined teams at SINA in Mpigi, while SINA members later entered hotel operations in Berlin, Potsdam and Lüneburg.
The exchange brought together different experiences of entrepreneurship, self-organization and learning through responsibility. Seminaris reports that ideas from it have since influenced projects, training and daily work inside the company.
Building a self-managed impact organization
Over the past 18 months, atmosbox has worked with SINA experts across Germany and Uganda. SINA expert Philipp supported the team in developing its self-management structure and helped when internal conflicts needed to be worked through. The collaboration later expanded to water systems, which SINA members in Uganda are testing and adapting for use in schools.
The atmosbox team says the support has helped people make more decisions independently and kept managers further away from micromanagement. What began with organizational support has grown into practical collaboration across two countries.
Next step: Bring us your challenge
Tell us the decision, product, programme or organizational challenge you are working on. We will explore whether a SINA expert or team can meaningfully contribute. Write to info@socialinnovationacademy.org with the subject “Challenge” and we can set up a free exploratory call.