The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has shortlisted SINA (Social Innovation Academy) and its founder, Etienne Salborn, as finalists in the Collective Social Innovation category of the 2026 Social Innovation Awards. The Foundation received more than 400 nominations this year. The winners will be announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2026.
SINA was built to address the education-to-employment gap that keeps millions of young people—especially refugees and young women—locked out of dignified work. In Uganda alone, hundreds of thousands of youths enter the job market every year for a small number of formal jobs, and across Africa displacement continues to rise. In this context, SINA communities replace passive service delivery with local ownership. Youth co-own and self-organize their learning spaces, take real roles that run the community—finance, logistics, training, safeguarding—and graduate by launching social enterprises rooted in lived experience. We call this freesponsibility: freedom paired with radical responsibility.
What makes SINA a collective social innovation is a shared framework that communities adopt and which evolves as a living community ecosystem. Authority is distributed through transparent role-based governance and integrative decision-making, so leadership emerges from contribution and everyone is accountable to peers. Replication happens laterally: teams who experience the framework take it home, adapt it to culture and context, and stay connected through the community ecosystem that shares standards, tools and data. Many sites are refugee-led and embedded in humanitarian coordination, which shifts power to those most affected.
This approach is changing outcomes and institutions. Since 2014, more than one hundred social enterprises have been launched from SINA communities, creating over 1,600 jobs. Independent analysis finds alumni incomes roughly three times higher than comparable peers and indicates a 5–10x social return per scholar within a decade. Cost structures remain low because communities run themselves with 50–100 scholars per site and no or minimal staff. Beyond enterprise results, vocational partners are piloting SINA’s Framework, and a state-level adoption is underway in Nigeria, showing how public systems can absorb the model. In refugee settlements, SINA communities are recognized as local partners and deliver practical improvements—from safe water and clean energy ventures to community infrastructure..
SINA’s next milestones focus on quality and evidence while scaling impact rather than a central organization. A mobile Nomad Team will accelerate set-ups and strengthen monitoring that fits low-literacy and crisis contexts, and communities will continue to share practice through a living playbook and open governance tools. The purpose remains clear: regenerative communities in a freesponsible world, where young people create their own futures through social entrepreneurship.
Learn more about the award, finalists on the World Economic Forum website:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/09/meet-the-finalists-schwab-foundation-2026-social-innovation-awards/