SINA is ecosystem of self-organised learning communities where disadvantaged and refugee youth develop their own social enterprises while running the community itself.

SINA (Social Innovation Academy) gGmbH · Mpigi, Uganda · since 2014

What runs: SINA is ecosystem of self-organised learning communities where disadvantaged and refugee youth develop their own social enterprises while running the community itself. Through the SINA Framework, young people work through limiting beliefs and difficult experiences, take on roles with real responsibilities, and learn by doing. They manage budgets, facilitate meetings, resolve conflicts and support new members. They identify problems from their own lives, test solutions with potential customers and build social enterprises. Each community governs its daily work locally while collaborating and learning across communities.
For how many: 24 communities (about 1.000 youth)
Legal form: NGO
Field: Human
Layer: Federation
What is broken: Many disadvantaged and refugee youth move through education and aid systems with little say over decisions affecting their lives and face few opportunities to earn a living. SINA creates places where they take responsibility and build social enterprises, but financially sustaining those places remains difficult. Communities need reliable funding or revenue streams while developing local ownership, and donor requirements can pull attention away from what people themselves identify as needed. Our unresolved question is how to make this approach economically durable and enable communities to support and replicate one another without becoming dependent.
What is needed: We would value working together on earned income and on how communities can support one another as the network grows. Connections to partners willing to fund the underlying community infrastructure, including the time needed to build trust and responsibility, would also help.
What can be given: We can share experience of running self-organised learning communities where young people take real responsibility and build social enterprises from problems they know firsthand. Through the SINA Expert Network, we can connect participants with practitioners who facilitate learning, work through conflict and support teams in practising self-organisation. This can take the form of peer exchanges, workshops or support with a specific challenge. Our communities also offer places for learning visits and opportunities to test ideas together with the people who will use them.
Link: https://www.socialinnovationacademy.org
In the register since: 6 October 2026

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