Awarded Ecosystem success Story with the Social Innovation Academy (SINA)
Social Innovation Academy (SINA), Uganda, socialinnovationacademy.org
Congratulations to the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) for winning an award at the 2024 Haier ZeroDX Awards! SINA was recognized for creating self-organized and 'freesponsible' learning spaces that empower individuals to drive social change.
As part of our collaboration with the Haier Model Institute (HMI), we proudly supported the 2024 Haier ZeroDistance Excellence Awards by nominating outstanding organizations, individuals, and case studies from around the world. We want to extend our deepest recognition to all participants, who are true pioneers in embracing new management models and fostering ZeroDistance with their customers, suppliers, and communities. Your innovative spirit is shaping the future of business!
I’m incredibly proud to announce that SINA, one of our nominees by the LAP Alliance, has truly earned this recognition through their purposeful work! Their achievements have already been highlighted in Forbes. You can find more details in the recent article „Zeros For Heroes: New Awards For Organizational Innovation” by Bill Fischer.
Discover more about SINA and their Ecosystem Success Story through an introductory video, an insightful interview with founder Etienne Salborn, and access to their case study for download.
If you’re new to Ecosystems and the New Economical Engine read the linked blog post first.
Image source: Mirko Kleiner, contents by Haier
Introductionary Video about SINA
Interview with Etienne Salborn, Founder SINA
This interview was conducted as part of the Haier ZeroDX Awards assessment, with Etienne Salborn, founder of SINA, interviewed by Mirko Kleiner.
What was the problem? How was it identified?
One major cause of hopelessness among youth in Africa is the scarcity of opportunity and employment. In Uganda, an estimated 700,000 individuals enter the labor market each year to compete for around 12,000 positions; it is not uncommon that one formal job announcement attracts over 2,000 applicants. In addition to lack of opportunity, worsening climate-related crises and outbreaks of violent conflict have in recent years created a collective 44 million displaced peoples and refugees on the African continent (see: UNHCR).
“We unleash the potentials of disadvantaged, marginalized young people, as well as refugees, to really become the change they want to see in the world, as social entrepreneurs ”
Amid all of this, Africa’s youth population is expected to double by 2050. Without intervention, African economies will further destabilize, and poverty will continue to increase, condemning millions to lives as passive recipients of aid, or worse. After volunteering at Uganda’s Kankobe Orphanage in 2006, Etienne Salborn came to identify education as a decisive area via which to intervene–but more importantly, to innovate.
Salborn’s initial efforts focused on securing educational sponsorships for as many orphans as was manageable at the time, without which most would likely not have attended high school. However, Salborn would eventually determine that the Ugandan educational system–colonial, traditional, rooted in memorization and obedience–did not adequately prepare its students to compete for an already extremely limited supply of jobs, and even less so for gainful employment with opportunity for advancement.
Who led the change?
In 2013, the first generation of sponsored students from Kankobe Orphanage graduated high school. Although empowered by their education, they had essentially no means of attending university, and faced probable unemployment in a dismal labor market. Instead, through an Open Space dialogue with Etienne Salborn, they became co-founders of the Social Innovation Academy, or SINA, beginning with their indispensable work as co-creators of the SINA Empowerment Framework.
By 2015, this model was in use at Jangu International, SINA’s inaugural campus-community located in Mpigi, Uganda. While its first class of participants (called “scholars”) were developing their social enterprises–innovative self-employment concepts which address community issues or needs through business–they also collectively managed Jangu itself. Operational roles, such as in accounting, logistics, training and outreach, allowed them as much or more influence as had Salborn himself over the growing community and its incoming scholars.
Image Source: SINA
Today, that growth amounts to 18 independently operated SINA communities in Uganda and neighboring countries, currently serving over 900 scholars. Each community is functionally autonomous, able to adapt to its own unique needs, yet all collectively guide and improve upon SINA’s highly replicable model. The result is a self-governing, self-organizing, adaptable, regenerative “community of communities”.
In addition to the dynamic roles scholars take up within their respective SINAs, they are empowered to create their own curriculum, and given access to resources and training specialized to the social enterprise they are developing, before eventually graduating as independent entrepreneurs. A few discover themselves to be well suited toward starting new SINA communities. Although this is not expected of any scholar, in the course of their training all are equipped with the tools to potentially do so if it aligns with their self-identified purpose.
Etienne Salborn’s Master’s program of the University of Innsbruck “Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation”, administered in Austria, focused sharply on the eliciting of individuals’ potential, as opposed to the prescribing of solutions. His most authoritative act at SINA, then, was to ensure that the organisation distributes authority and runs on the philosophy of freesponsibility. In order to offer a viable alternative to Uganda’s established educational system and change the country’s employment landscape, SINA had also to offer an alternative to the rigid hierarchies and antiquated barriers present in both.
Salborn may indeed have spearheaded this particular movement toward change. The community he continues to advance today, however, is more rightly attributable to itself. With every new cohort of scholars and every expansion, SINA adapts. So, to the question of who led the change, a collective answer: We are all leaders here, and change is constant.
How many teams/individuals were involved?
To reiterate the established timeline: the process of changing education and employment in Uganda began with a small handful of changemaker-makers, including the first class of SINA scholars and Etienne Salborn. Since then, the number of individuals and communities involved has scaled to 18. Altogether, they form a coequal system in which (by design) the scholars run the organisation and manage its functions.
The combined effect empowers scholars psychologically, trains them for their own eventual social entrepreneurship, and leads to improvements in the system benefitting the existing community and future scholars alike. This is one fundamental reason why change for SINA is a constant, not a turning point. It also helps illustrate the regenerative, ongoing nature of its broader community.
Further, the fluid nature of the community and its members’ roles within it are incompatible with attributing specific aspects of change to specific groups and roles at specific times. It is possible, though, to infer strong community expansion and increased scholar intake–and therefore, membership growth–from a basic timeline of SINA’s activity after the establishment of Jangu:
2016: First replication, scholar-organized, within Nakivale Refugee Settlement (Uganda)
2018: SINA community established in Bidibidi Refugee Settlement (Uganda)
2019: SINA community established in a slum area of Kampala (Uganda)
2020: SINA communities established in Kyaka II Refugee Settlement (Uganda) and Tongogara Refugee Camp (Zimbabwe)
2021: SINA communities established in Bukavu and Kinshasa (DRC), Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement (Uganda) and Kakuma/Kalobeyei Refugee Camp (Kenya)
2023: SINA communities established in Njombe and Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Cape Verde
2024: SINA communities established in Kampala (urban refugees), Nyenga, Bombo and Kamuli (Uganda)
Moving steadily forward, growing stronger with every new location, participant or scholar, the “community of communities” is set to continue expanding. In 2025, SINAs will open in Nepal, its first non-African establishment, as well as Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa. None of this would be the success that it is, if not for the scholars as beneficiaries entering a regenerative cycle transforming from beneficiaries into co-creators and co-owners, running the organization and replicating the SINA Framework further.
What systems and tools were employed?
After starting with its own self-organized system, in 2016 SINA shifted toward the emerging social technology of Holacracy. The shift was a logical evolution of the organisation’s alternative to top-down hierarchies. In Holacracy, authority is distributed. Job titles are replaced with roles. As with the various teams comprising SINA, individuals’ roles can overlap, which aids cooperation and compromise, and nourishes the web of connections present throughout the organisation.
Even new scholars participate in SINA’s Holacracy. Through it, they find themselves directly empowered, not only forging their own paths but contributing–sometimes on multiple fronts at once–to the present and future of theirs and others’ SINA communities.
While remaining grounded in its origins, SINA’s operating structure again underwent a significant evolution beginning in 2019. The symbiosis of people and organisation was further defined and put into practice. New mechanisms for illuminating, dissecting and processing tensions emerged, integrating organisational structure and personal well-being. This included the advent of the SINA-born concept of freesponsibility: exercising freedom with acute awareness of the positive and negative effects of one’s actions (e.g., on self, others, the environment).
What decisions did the team need to make?
As an alternative to a predict-and-control system, SINA’s organisational design works through interlinked, autonomous structures. Accountability in this model applies more to groups as opposed to individuals. The multi-management of SINA also makes it highly transparent, allowing for the constant updating of roles and improvements to the organisation.
As previously discussed, Salborn’s decentralising of authority in SINA set the tone for the community in perpetuity. Following this, all consequential decisions would be made by dialogue and consensus between a combination of (or all) teams. Tensions anywhere in the organizational structure are addressed and relieved in a similar manner. So, aside from that initial rejection of formal authority, the organisation’s operations cannot be attributed to any one decision or individual.
What resources were they given?
This organisation truly started from zero. Individuals within the Social Innovation Academy raised funds as needed along the way. Resourcefulness is at SINA’s core; for example most of its learning spaces were constructed from upcycled plastic bottles. The most tapped resource is human potential and ingenuity, which are not given but rather unlocked.
Did they collaborate with external parties?
No external parties were involved. At most, outside talent (mostly local) was drawn into the organisation, volunteering time, labor, tools and expertise toward practical or structural projects.
What were the most significant challenges and how did the team overcome them?
One particularly significant hurdle to clear was (and remains) to shift the mindset of scholars. Youth arrive at SINA after growing up in a society based on obedience and hierarchy. Many also arrive traumatized. Encouraging them to take ownership and make independent decisions is challenging.
To get scholars past this “confusion stage” (lasting approximately three months from their arrival at any campus-community), SINA incorporates a thorough orientation and mindset-change process. Participants are encouraged to find their purpose and align their plans and actions accordingly. Once this is successful, they become scholars and are gradually introduced to the self-organisational framework.
Maintaining the regenerative cycle of SINA and its stability were challenging as well. Especially as the community grew, the scholar-teacher-entrepreneur pathway needed robust reinforcement, ensuring knowledge and skills are effectively passed down.
Finally, scalability and replication: As SINA grew, it proved complicated to maintain the core values and effectiveness of the original framework. In response, the organisation developed a scalability model which functioned on teams from emerging SINA communities spending time in established ones, learning the framework deeply before replicating it.
Image Source: SINA
What were the impacts?
Impact on User Experience
As SINA’s primary beneficiaries, its scholars are the closest analogue it has to customers. Research shows that these “customers” not only tripled their income on average compared to a control group, but created dozens of social enterprises employing hundreds. Few of them, however, would likely have attained such success if not also for the deep personal transformation facilitated at SINA communities. All told, the SINA Framework not only achieves but exceeds the spirit of zero distance.
Impact on Ecosystem Parties
Various SINA alumni and their social enterprises address critical environmental and societal issues and meet all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Examples of note include Uganics and Tusafishe.
Toward the societal end of the spectrum, Uganics produces a highly effective, organic mosquito-repellent soap. The primary benefit is a reduction in malaria cases and their subsequent associated costs–medical, financial, familial, et al. Moreover, the company has grown to employ around 50 (primarily female) individuals. Lastly, by successfully applying a cross-subsidy model, Uganics is able to make their flagship product available to those who suffer most from malaria. The price of one bar purchased by a tourist or a resort allows for two bars to be sold to a rural customer at an affordable price.
Tusafishe, using large bio-sand water filters, provide safe, clean drinking water to over 300,000 regular customers. Many are schools, refugee camps, and residents of disadvantaged communities. Since the filters themselves use moringa seeds (requiring the planting of moringa trees), and because more filtering leads to less boiling of water, Tusafishe is responsible for the capture or offset of over 50,000 tons of Co2.
Other SINA alumni have launched successful enterprises involving biodegradable drinking straws, upcycled plastic bottles as a construction material, and flooring material made from plastic bags and eggshells. Some have gained international recognition through the African Business Heroes organisation or the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award, and been featured on CNN and the BBC.
SINA, its scholars and alumni, after a decade in practice, comprise a fairly large ecosystem on their own. The array of functions and enterprises associated with SINA brings positive change to the lives of untold thousands of Africans yearly. The community continues expanding without imposing culturally or harming the environment, which allows it to integrate with other ecosystems. All told, the regenerative function of SINA is continually being fed into, allowing for SINA communities to better serve new and future scholars.
Impact on Employees
Although everyone contributes, essentially no one is considered an employee in a SINA community. But, the above quote–from alum Joseph Bwinika of the Nakivale Refugee Settlement–is illustrative of the effect any employer should wish to have on their employees. An exception to formal employment within SINA’s community is the replication support team, SINA Global. Ten members drawn from different SINAs are responsible for activities related to the establishment of new SINA communities and the prosperity of all existing ones.
“I’m living my dream instead of dreaming my life!”
SINA members in general, as confirmed by independent studies, experience an increased sense of agency and self-reliance, and growth both personal and professional. At minimum, scholars go on to earn better pay than they did prior to SINA training. A majority continue with entrepreneurial activities, including owning and operating their own enterprises. In this case, it may be more pertinent to ask how the changemaking patterns of SINA impact the employees its alumni eventually hire, some of whom have never even set foot on one of its campuses.
Impact on the Overall Organization
The manner in which the Social Innovation Academy conducts itself and creates changemakers led to its steady, semi-exponential growth–from 20 scholars at one SINA to over 900 across 18 SINAs within 10 years. The success of the SINA framework’s simultaneous evolution/replication during its first decade has benefitted the organisation immensely. Each instance of recognition it receives, also, benefits the organisation and the entire SINA community: the UNHCR Innovation Award, the Tony Hsieh Award, the Pan African Award for Entrepreneurship in Education, Ockenden Prize, and the Modern Work Award are among its honors.
Impact on Corporate Culture
Traditional corporate culture is somewhat inapplicable or alien to the work and motivations of the SINA community. Naturally, at its current size, the organisation requires formal elements of business (such as accounting) in order to function. And, similar at least to a more modern, enlightened corporate culture, SINA aligns its purpose with that of its members, enabling teams and scholars to work independently yet collectively to solve pressing issues.
However, similar to the question of impact on employees, the answer here lies in the experience of the employees of SINA alumni, not of SINA itself. Even considering social return on investment–like the fact that many employees working at a social enterprise run by a SINA graduate would have otherwise been unemployed–does not account for probable benefits to the work environment itself.
How exactly would one describe a workplace where the person in charge graduated from their entrepreneurial training with a goal to “be the change they want to see”, practices and imparts a concept like freesponsibility, and understands that there is a hard limit to the usefulness of hierarchy? These are traits that managers and executives worldwide might consider adopting.
Statements from SINA Scholars:
“After becoming a refugee in Uganda, I lived a life of struggle trying to contribute anything I could to my family through small and informal business activities. When I joined SINA, my understanding of business changed. From just making profits, I saw how I could also help make the lives of others easier.”
– Rebecca Aime
"SINA is a dream-maker and has made my dream a reality. I realized how best I could use the challenge I had growing up and make a better life for myself but also for the community. It helped me realize that what I faced in the past does not define me but what I decide to do forth is what actually defines me."
– Janet Aguti
"I was a girl not believing in myself. I knew that I am nothing. I wanted to kill myself due to the things I was going through. Here at SINA, it is a place where I was welcomed, no one judged me. People accept you the way you are. I was able to discover myself and my potential, and I healed from the traumas I faced when growing up."
– Barbra Nantongo
"SINA has made me become the person l have been praying to be and restored faith in me to stand, fight and move out of my comfort zones. One of my biggest learnings is that we all need to be proactive rather than just respond to situations. We do need hope, but what we need even more is action. Once we start to act, hope follows.“
– Evode Hakizimana Havyarimana
“Life decided to give me another chance to shine when I joined SINA. I was living a hopeless life as a refugee. I was out of school. I had given up on myself. I believed a refugee could never achieve anything and is supposed to sit and wait for aid. In SINA, I went through personal development and discovered myself and my potential. It opened my eyes and changed the way I see the world. I now perceive challenges as opportunities, which has changed my life a lot.”
– Guilaine Bayubasire
“SINA is creating changemaker-makers like me. I was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2012, political instabilities forced me to flee to Uganda and I became a refugee. Like many of the 1,4 million refugees in Uganda, I was lost, and broke, not knowing how to sustain. I joined SINA as a beneficiary in 2016. I went through the SINA empowerment model, which has helped me and hundreds of others to overcome fears and unleash potentials we did not even know existed. I found meaning in my previous suffering and motivation to support others in similar situations. Since then, it’s been a powerful journey for me. I became a trainer and facilitator in SINA, and various other roles helped me to grow. I saw an alignment of the purpose of myself and SINA then I co-founded a replication of SINA in Kampala for urban refugees, and later, when SINA Global was created, I joined the team and became a director to foster the global movement of freesponsible and self-organized learning spaces contributing and enabling a whole generation of African youth to create a future for themselves.”
– Emile Kwilyame
Support SINA
To support SINA visit their website for more informations or reach out to us to get a direct contact with Etienne.
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Congratulations to the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) for winning an award at the 2024 Haier ZeroDX Awards! SINA was recognized for creating self-organized and 'freesponsible' learning spaces that empower individuals to drive social change.