Creating 100,000 change-makers (Etienne Salborn, SINA)

Speaker A: What if the solution to global poverty wasn't more aid, but more entrepreneurs? This is what I explore in this episode with Etienne Salborn, who has created impact at, uh, what I consider an amazing scale. He started off fairly accidentally getting involved in Africa, uh, on an individual project and then learning one step at a time. He realized that the current solutions, uh, were not working. And he's created a model in Sina, the Social Innovation Academy that actually breaks through the current paradigm and created a self replicating, self multiplying organization that has been raising up social entrepreneurs at the ground level for many years. He's now scaled to 19 communities across Africa and he's continuing to redefine education, leadership and impact. He's won awards for his pioneering stance. But what I love about Etienne is his humility, his desire to make an impact, and his radically decentralized model so that he creates a movement that grows beyond him rather than something that he personally needs to manage at every stage. So if you want to multiply leaders and leave a legacy that lasts, listen in to Etienne Salborn of Sena. Welcome to the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. I'm Richard Metcalfe, founder of X Quadrant, and my mission is to help the world's top CEOs, uh, and entrepreneurs shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a huge positive impact on our world. Now that requires you to reinvent yourself

Speaker B: and transform your business.

Speaker A: So, uh, if you're ready to play a bigger game than ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier CEO. Uh,

Speaker B: hi Etienne, and welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Speaker B: Well, it's great to have you here. I find your journey really, really inspiring. You're, uh, a social entrepreneur. You founded the Social Innovation Academy, uh, which is a, uh, really amazing initiative empowering disadvantaged youth and refugee communities in Africa, uh, to become self sufficient social entrepreneurs. I know you started this in Uganda in 2006 when you initiated an educational sponsorship program for orphans. Uh, you then went ahead and built Sina, uh, the Social Innovation Academy because you saw the need for long term support and you've grown that into 18 different communities or even more perhaps now in, uh, over six African countries. And um, what I love about this is that you've helped people transition from receiving aid to actually becoming, uh, change makers in their local community and making an impact. And I know you have a special term for this which we can get into, which is called free sponsibility, which sounds really fascinating. So welcome again. Let's just jump in by saying, like, what say you on this journey? Right. Um, you've been making a massive impact. You're not, not African by birth, I understand. So like, how did you end up in Africa launching this, you know, with this big vision?

Speaker C: Yeah, I must say it has never been kind of this big vision. I need to do this and that's what I'm going to do. But it's been a continuous journey of one challenge, needing a solution, leading to something that again had a challenge. And along the way we are where we are today. And so like you said, it started in 2006. I, uh, originally come from Germany. I've been born and raised in Berlin and didn't want to join the uh, Obligatory German Military Basic Service and look for an alternative and saw that there was a possibility to go abroad. And I ended up going to Uganda and lived in a rural orphanage for one year with about 120 kids who I learned after finishing primary school couldn't continue going to further education. So that was the start of a sponsorship program that allowed them to continue going to school every year. Kept me coming back once in a while and looking after them and the sponsorship program. And in 2000, um, so let me interrupt.

Speaker B: So you just went about to rush over that. So you set up this sponsorship program, is that right?

Speaker C: Exactly. First with about 10 kids, 15 kids, and then every year about 10 to 20 joined. So it started growing every year slowly. And the kids would go into different boarding schools and families in Europe, um, would support them with the tuition fees to go to the boarding schools.

Speaker B: Amazing. So basically you just, when you were there, you saw this need, you said need to get these children into school. How can I do it?

Speaker C: Exactly. That they could continue after primary school because they were 11, 12 years old and had nowhere to go. So that was a starting point. The first problem needed a solution. And then in 2013, the first generation of these kids that I had lived with as well in the orphanage for a year had had grown up, they had finished high school, even had fantastic grades, but couldn't find a job afterwards or couldn't go to university because the tuition fees compared to local income are really high. So the goal that they would be able to self sustain afterwards wasn't met. And that uh, was a new challenge that needed to be solved. And so we actually sat together in like an open space and discussed what, how can we solve this challenge? And it was clear what is needed is a space that young people would create their own jobs by creating social enterprises. So not just any jobs, but also jobs that are good for the environment and good for the society. And that's what we did in 2014. We created the first Sena community, or Sinar, as an organization and the first community, and developed a framework, you could say, that transforms not just the former orphans, but especially any kind of marginalized, disadvantaged young people to become social entrepreneurs, to first of all discover themselves, find a purpose aligned to the purpose, and then gain the skills and experiences needed to be able to live out their purpose and then create a social enterprise around that.

Speaker B: So again, it sounds amazing, uh, when you talk about community, it's like a program, is that right? Like, it's like a program for a couple of years where you kind of incubate these budding entrepreneurs, um, and then send them out into the wild. Or is this, do you see it slightly differently?

Speaker C: Community? The first one we build is actually a piece of land on top of a hill about an hour outside of the capital, quite rural, but not too far away. And there Today it's about 100 people that live there or very close nearby it. And we have today, as you often mentioned, 19 today actually started another senior community in Nepal. So that's our 19th and the first, also out of Africa. And every of the senior communities have basically a physical space. Sometimes that's an erectica, sometimes that is, um, their own land, um, in a rural area or integrated into, for example, a vocational school. And so that's a community of typically 50 to 100 people that either live there or come there on a regular basis, daily basis, and transform to become social entrepreneurs.

Speaker B: That's amazing. And so what I know is that from, uh, that first community you've got to getting on towards 100. At the moment, not quite, but round numbers, it's getting to be about 100. And so over that 10 years period you've, um, you've created, um. Is that right, 100 community? No, it's 19 means 100 entrepreneurs. Is that right? I'm going to get this right.

Speaker C: Yeah. So it's 19 locations, 19 communities, whereby each of the communities is in the end its own, you could say legal entity for the community, for the people on the ground, by the people on the ground, which is important. So people from disadvantaged backgrounds are really in charge of themselves and they're not working for someone else but for themselves and create their own solutions. And all those collectively over the last 10 years have created a hundred, couple more, uh, over 100 social enterprises that are currently in existence. Of course, there have been a Few more that started but maybe didn't make it, but a hundred that are currently up and running operational, which have created around 1000 jobs as well. Right.

Speaker B: Okay. So, yeah, so it's really a multiplicative effect, right? You build these communities, get a critical mass of people together. Some of them don't work, some of them go big, um, and then that allows you to multiply. I think what I love about your vision, Etienne, as we were speaking, uh, in an earlier conversation, as we're getting to know each other, is that you've got this vision to does the first 10 years creating perhaps, um, 100 social enterprises over that first 10 years. And you want to create 100,000. So 1000x multiplication in the next 10 years. So I think there's really two sides to this story. Right, let's look at these two phases, right? The first is how did you create the first hundred? Right? So like, what was, what did you have to. What did you learn on that process? And then the second question we can get to perhaps afterwards is, what's it going to take then to scale a thousandfold? So let's start on that first one. What are your learnings? I mean, uh, as you. Because you said that you started with no big vision. It wasn't like you said, on day one, I'm going to transform Africa or something. You said, oh, I've got some orphans here. They need schooling. And they're like these schooled, uh, kids now need jobs and they can't get them. And so you say you took it very incrementally, solving the problem that's in front of you. So how did you then, you know, what were the problems you had to solve at that point to kind of create what you have now? What were the main obstacles?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I think one of the main obstacles is myself, you could say. So I knew that from the beginning. And everything we designed in Sina collectively, but also in a way that it is self organized. Distributed authority is not dependent on me, people. I'm, um, not the boss or I'm not the one that people work for, but they work for themselves. And that's key. I learned that also in my studies. I studied peace and development, uh, in the Master, while the sponsorship program was, um, and developing. And they realized you have to start with yourself. If I want to create peace in the world, I have to first have peace with myself and then I can go out and support maybe others in the same process. But it starts with me. And so the same, the same idea for helping young People to become the change they want to see, they have to realize who they are, uh, they have to align to their purpose and then be the change they want to see by implementing, for example, social enterprise. So with that one learning was that it cannot be also knowing the background, ah, that so many people have come to Africa and said, this is wrong, this is right, you should do this in this way. And that almost never really lasted beyond the person telling people what to do. So we have a completely different approach that is really the people for themselves and also holding each other accountable. So we're using an adopted version of Holacracy that distributes authority to keep the organization running. But it also becomes, over the years, it became kind of the curriculum. So young people come in often from kind of a state of survival feeling maybe they're a failure in society because society has labeled them as such. Having gone through traumatic experiences. People even have gone through, um, events like abduction and becoming a child soldier or having traumatic experiences such as rape or sexual violence and others. And many have not gone far in formal education. So helping the young people first of all to discover themselves, that was a big learning to develop the individuals. And we spent about three months in the beginning in the training that helps, uh, that people almost transform like caterpillars become butterflies. Meaning the young people might not even realize that they have the potential to transform because the environment they're in, it might not happen. But then when I come to Sina, they realize the difficult, difficult past doesn't have to define their future. They can redefine their future, they can set new goals, they can learn the tools, how to work on the goals every day and make them happen. And that then they become like butterflies actually literally almost start flying because they know what they want to do in life. But, uh, then they don't have yet the skills to make that happen. And that's where the self organization comes in, that people take up roles and responsibilities aligning to their purpose. Take up roles in finance if that's in your interest. Take up roles and training if that's in your interest. So every senior community in the end is run by the people. There's no outsiders that need to come in. I'm not giving any sessions. But it's people that have gone through the program that become key role fillers and run the organization. Which also means there's almost no staff. People become the staff, the beneficiaries become the staff. And they are then the ones keeping it running, keeping it going and the end leaving with their own enterprises at some point and in the meantime growing personally, professionally and also keeping the running costs of each of the communities low because you don't need to pay stuff.

Speaker B: Amazing. So yeah, uh, I love the way you've really taken away the friction to growth. Right. Because it's self sustaining. It's not a structure you have to impose. So two questions, I suppose the first question is what's one of the kind of the most helpful reframes that people have or an exercise they do, like in that three months when you're helping them discover themselves and get over their kind of traumatic past, uh, or their limiting beliefs about what's possible. What's like a moment which tends to kind of really create an aha, uh, moment for them.

Speaker C: Yeah, there's several ones that we have inbuilt or they're um, also a little bit adjusted according to the different needs. We have almost half of the senior communities, for example in refugee camps or refugee settlements. So that's a little bit of different environment than maybe in a city or in a rural environment. So people have with a framework the liberty or they have to adopt it. It's a little bit more like nature replicates. The tree has all the DNA or the seed has all the DNA it needs for growing in a different location. But then it has to locally adapt and the young tree will look different than a mother tree, but it's the same species. So people have to look at adapt and have found some of their own sessions that are then again informing each other. Maybe this has worked for us like in osteochititis here. But some that for example are typical is within the first three months that we also call the confusion stage, which can be quite confusing. Um, is people come from again this often failed educational system where there was a lot of exams and maybe they didn't do well on them. And then in Sina there's no exams, there's no grades or anything like that. But then we have a specific activity that we do which is a little bit radical but really transformational and has worked well. So for the aha moment it really works well. So it's like to have the facilitator come in the day before and doing something more, a little bit like a lecture style session. And then the next day same person comes back and says very angrily, you didn't pay attention. Now we're going to do an exam and whoever is going to fail it have to leave, has to leave. Um, CINO has to leave the organization. So put people under a Lot of pressure, they know from back from the school system. And some people even start crying. Um, and that's okay because then they do the exam and we collect it, put it on the ground and literally set it on fire, burn it in the room. And then other people start crying, the ones that thought maybe they did well. And like, why are you burning it? It's so they don't understand. And that's leading to a discussion. Why don't we do exomes and sinner? Why are you not learning for the teacher? And you have to find the right answer. But why are we helping you to discover your own answers or answers that no one has found in the world, like how to solve climate change or other things that have no answers? So it's leading to kind of an introduction into the system of SINA and how it's different. And that, for example, has always worked well. Wow. Yeah.

Speaker B: Amazing. Uh, so, yeah, I love these. Uh, what it really shows you've been thinking very carefully, right. About the experience that you're taking people through. And there's a freedom to evolve with that, as you said, and for each community to figure out what its unique, uh, take is going to be. Which kind of brings me to the second question I had as you were sharing this, which is, what is the structure that you do put in place? Because, uh, you're saying basically you're not doing it. I need to employ a special team to do this. It's the actual beneficiaries who then become the leaders and who then raise up the next generation, uh, within the system. And so is there some need for some. What is the need for the centralized component or the oversight or the structuring or the creating the common language or vocabulary or maintaining those standards? How do you see your role, um, in creating something that's recognizably SINA versus a bunch of people meeting other people?

Speaker C: Yeah, that also evolved a little bit over the years. So we started with this one community in 2014, 2016. There was the first group of refugees that found SINA and joined and said, if the goal is for us to create a social enterprise, can we not replicate the model of SINA and make that our social enterprise? And so we supported them and they took it to the revtcam. And then we realized it is actually scalable and it can be replicated in new locations. And so from there, many more started coming up, organizations, founders, or maybe teams or communities, founders and joined and said, we want to replicate this. And so in 2019, when we had about six, seven, um, uh, communities. We realized it needs a little bit more structuring. It cannot just be mushrooms that come up in any place without kind of understanding how and why it works. So we started to more codify the framework, writing it down and make it publicly available, but also designing what we call a replication journey, or also refer to it as the change maker, uh, maker journey. Because change makers are the entrepreneurs and we need people that make the change makers. So they're the change makers. And so they, they are typically from the same background, from disadvantaged backgrounds having this transformation from butterfly becoming ah, butterflies. So going through the senior framework as anyone else. But then also we train them on why, understanding deeply why it is in the way it is. So they can also adapt it because they have to adapt it locally. And then key elements like the self organization, but also finance and training. And so they're really good in all the different elements. And it's a team. Typically three people that come to the main senior community or established senior community, spend there about a year to really go through and then going back to their own communities and then getting it started. So that means often it has worked super well because people, it has given themselves so much that they want to pay it forward and that works really well. But also because they have had this on experience, they have been through it, they understand the values and it's a lot about values, um, kind of the, the community system, um, because it's much more about the people than it is maybe about writing it down, how it works. A rule book makes sense to have, but it's like when you play football, you don't want to check the rules in the game, you want to kind of play the game and if there's a critical situation, maybe then you go back to the rule book and check. So people rather learn by playing and then can play somewhere else as well?

Speaker B: Yes. I love this fact that you have this change maker maker journey. So it does involve giving them some of your concepts and distinctions, um, but then also letting them get back into it fairly quickly by the sound of it. So do you do a thing where they like, they have a go, then they come back and they kind of huddle and reflect on how it's going and then go back in. Or is it more you take them away, you train them up and you put them back out there?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was kind of more from the beginning, drafting almost like the seeds that have all the DNA to grow in a different environment and then they have to grow on their own. Then we Realized, okay, there's more support needed and if it's close by to many other Sina communities. So for example in Uganda we have the majority. It's easy to have a movement. People can visit each other or can come for specific trainings or support each other. If we have seen our communities like now Nepal that are quite far away, that becomes more challenging. So we do have now a team that we call the nomads who can highly uh, trained, they have experiences in different senior communities and many different roles or some have even been in many different communities over time. And then if there's some support needed, we can send them to a community and they spend a longer period of time, maybe up to six months. And now we're also running kind of an experiment that they will go for example to Nigeria soon, whereby Nigerians have been in Uganda only for six months to shorten the time of replication. And then they go on the ground and help the team getting started. And then the next evolution will even be that we have a team of skilled, experienced people that can go into altogether a new community. So again the time of replication is almost halved because then they can start from the beginning having beneficiaries who again become also trainers, mentors, coaches, become co owners of the organization or running the organization. And so then the original team that came to start it slowly goes out and the community keeps on running with kind of a regenerative cycle where again people, beneficiaries become the owners of the organization and in the end um, transition out with their own enterprises and new ones. Keep it running.

Speaker A: I hope you're enjoying this conversation. This is just a quick interlude to remind you that my book Making Time for Strategy is now available. If you want to be less busy and more successful, I highly recommend that you check it out. Why not head over ah to makingtime4strategy.com to find out the details. Now back to the conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, amazing.

Speaker A: Uh, so tell me a bit about

Speaker B: the um, this kind of key mindset transformation that it sounds like you've had to, you've had to bake very much into uh, um, the program which is really about, I think it's about, as I understood from our previous conversation, um, people perhaps often come with a sense that they need to be told what to do by somebody and you actually really empower them to say no, you are a change maker, right? You get to create this journey yourself. Um, and you talk about free sponsibility as one of your key first parts of your DNA. So just talk about how that came about and like how you see that, that uh, distinction or that language helping people to kind of really own their futures.

Speaker C: Yeah. So the starting point was kind of this educational system that in many countries, um, like Uganda, but similar countries in the region as well, it's often still, I would say relict of colonial times, people needed to learn specific things and only operate them without even understanding them. That was okay back then, but today that system is still kind of there. People just learn and memorize and regurgitate information. There's hardly any teamwork, partner work, challenges to overcome, new solutions to be found. That's not really there in the current educational system. So having people from that background now start their own enterprises. Yes. People in for example in Uganda are very entrepreneurial. It's one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world. But that's out of necessity to survive. So what people will do is riding a motorcycle taxi, selling stuff on the street, Agriculture as well. They have their own land. So things that can help them survive and that's great, but not something that will transform the economy, that will create jobs for others or at best maybe for a couple of people. So we wanted to take them to the next level, how to create a real enterprise, a company that employs tens, hundreds, thousands of people and also helps the economy by really paying taxes and everything. So that was a difficult starting point to overcome. And free responsibility has been our philosophy that has made that possible. So people come into the organizations, into the different senior communities and are given a lot of freedom, um, because they are co owning it, co running it. But it has to come together with the responsibility. That's why it's one word in our senior language that it cannot be separated, it has to be together. The freedom must come with the responsibility. And so the more responsibility people take up by for example taking up small roles, the more freedom again they will gain, which is a natural thing. If you lend out uh, some money and someone pays a buck, you might be inclined to lend a little bit more money next time because you're sure the person is going to pay it back. So similar idea. People take up roles in a self organized system and do them well, even if it's a very tiny role, they will take up bigger roles and bigger roles and bigger roles and then be in charge of budgets and be in charge of higher decisions and be already a leader within an element of the community. And that's all for responsibility. And people have to also, when it comes to social enterprises, be aware what are the challenges we want to solve and what are the root causes of the challenges and also the solutions we are creating? Is it really creating a solution or is it creating new challenges? So really always be aware the freedom I have to do something. What, uh, are, where does it stop and maybe why does it infringe or touch upon the freedom of others and be very conscious about that. And so that's also kind of our purpose. That would love to see in the end almost like a free sponsible world. If everyone would always consider that what's the freedom? But how's that also the responsibility that counters it? I think the world would be a much different place and a much better place.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, beautiful. So say let the philosophy and the way that you've been able to create this replicate, replicating, um, uh, entity. In fact, it reminds me of a lot of work I do within, within companies, right? Because there's one thing about having leaders and there's, but there's one thing about having leaders who build other leaders. And it's what you were saying about change maker makers. I think for many, many leaders they are uh, of uh, beast.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: They're failing at the responsibility and opportunity to raise up other leaders. Because what they'll tend to say is I just don't have the right people around me. You know, uh, you know, I've been, I've inherited some people or whatever, they're not operating at the right level. Which basically what they're really saying is that when you say like that is, it's like, oh, I just need to import other people who have been properly trained. Right. And you know, or losing for the magical unicorns. But what you really, what I love about what you're doing is you say no, no, everyone's, you know, they might come in with a certain way of thinking. Uh, but actually, well, we have a journey for them to help them step into new levels of leadership. And then we have a journey to help them then raise up the next generation and start to multiply the number of leaders within this entity.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: Because entrepreneurs, they're leaders, right? But even within a normal enterprise, uh, there's the same dynamic going on. And so I think what you're sharing here is inspiring for what you're doing in its own world and relevant to perhaps many other movements. But it's also relevant for every leader because if you can make leaders, who can make leaders, then suddenly you are leading a movement of change in whatever industry you're in. So I do love this angle. Uh, so let's talk about the next stage which Is, um, Etienne, you said

Speaker C: maybe one more thing to add there, which, if you think it through, in the end, what we're trying to do is always becoming obsolete. Like myself, within a role, within a community, within an enterprise. Because, for example, if you're a social enterprise and you're really trying to solve a challenge, a problem, the goal shouldn't be to sustain forever. It's not sustainability, but the goal is to actually have that problem solved. And if it's solved, you're done. Maybe you move on to different geography, or you're moving on to different field, but the problem should be solvable and as well for me or for other leaders, it's. The goal should be to empower others to take it over and do it better than I can. And then I can, of course, move to something else or the growth or scalability of it. Um, but that's often what I see. People, not so much considering they're doing it well, and they're standing in a way potentially of others taking it over, doing it equally well or even better. And it's almost like in a forest. I, uh, was like natural, um, metaphors. In the forest, if there's a giant tree, no one around it, no other tree around it will really have the chance to grow. But if that tree falls, many other trees will come up and maybe they will do something, um, better than the original tree did. Right. Because they have the space for it. But often we don't allow for that space.

Speaker B: Beautiful metaphor. I love it. Um, how did you experience that yourself? So were there moments when you were, like, actually worried about, am I giving up too much control? Am I, like, letting this thing. Is it going to survive without me at the center or me making this happen? Was it a very natural process for you, or did you have to kind of get over some of your own fears about that process of letting go?

Speaker C: Of course, sometimes there was always fears involved. Is this going to work? Um, but I think I had always this determination that it will work, or never the doubt that it will not. Um, but specific elements, maybe. For example, we talked about the confusion stage. So someone is having this role of coordinating it, who is going to give what session support them to do it, that the cycle can actually happen, that people become, from beneficiaries, become trainers, and then, um, the cycle's there. So that role that we call, for example, the confusion stage coordinator is key. And for example, in the first community, that role has changed every 1, 2, 3 years to someone else taking it over. And for the first few years, it always felt like, oh, uh, is this going to work? Is everything going to collapse? Because that's the beginning and if that's not working, then everything else later will also not work. And sometimes in the beginning felt for me at least like a miracle that it did work. And then now it's 10 years and it still feels like it might not work. But I think if the system and uh, it's really more about the system. The system has enough people within it that understand it well and that have the values it will kind of self correct. Of course it will diverge left and right once in a while, but it comes back in centers. And we have the inbuilt problem basically in every single community that there's maybe about 1/3. People have just come in, they have no idea how this works and they have this completely different mindset and are going through a transformation. You have maybe one third who understand it well, but they are already transitioning out with their own enterprises or other opportunities. And then you have maybe 1/3 who are somehow in the middle and only potentially five to 10 people who really get it, who are there and to hold it together. And that can be enough for about 50 to 100 people. And with that give me or many of us more confidence that that's enough. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have that critical mass to keep it evolving and regenerating.

Speaker B: Yeah, amazing. I love these um, I m mean really a practical um, way of understanding how you've operationalized this. So let's talk about the next phase which is over the next 10 years you want, say you want to create 100,000 social enterPR across the continent. Right. So that's really a thousand times uh, change. So at this point what's going to need to shift to make that possible? Is it really nothing? Is it just I've got to let we have the model, it's just going to naturally propagate or is there something else which you see other moves you might need to start to make to realize that vision?

Speaker C: Yeah. So first of all it has sina has the potential, the framework has the potential to almost scale exponentially. Why? Because again, it's not that we're scaling an organization to have many branches that will be much more resource intensive and difficult to manage, but we're helping people to create their own organizations based on the framework and then have this kind of community ecosystem of all the communities. And it started with just maybe one replication per year, then it was 2, 3, 5. Now we are about 5 to 7 per year. And that's kindly the bottleneck that one of the main communities can host to. People have to go through it and then take it to another level. So that's where what we're changing right now is experimenting with how does it work if people come for a shorter time frame and then going, for example, to Nigeria to support the setup. And then the next level is that a whole team again can go to a completely new location and have it started there. And then at the same time, what is starting to happen is that existing sina communities that have replicated are also starting to replicate themselves. So for example, we're working in one refugee camp a lot with South Sudanese refugees. And South Sudan has become much more stable. So many people are thinking of how do we take it back now to South Sudan to create more opportunities as well in South Sudan. So they are going to be the ones that may be replicated again to a new location. And then it's basically unleashed, right? Because we can have new teams going to new locations. They get it started, can host teams in existing senior communities who almost like cell split and go somewhere else to create a new UM community. And with that, UM it is really again decentralized. But what keeps us all together is the purpose, the values, and this framework that also collectively evolves. People's best practices from different communities are brought back into it. And it evolves. And so everyone owns it, everyone can make changes to it. And this way I do believe, of course, it's an ambitious goal, but it can be possible to have a thousand senior communities that have created 100,000 UM enterprises by within the next 10 years. And we're already coming to, I would say, a tipping point where more traditional institutions are starting to partner with us. And that can later as well change the whole system. That, for example, two of the newer senior communities from last year are in vocational centers who have potentially a challenge that young people pay tuition fees, gain skills, gain a certificate, but then don't find a job. So what's the point? And now alumni of those vocational centers are the ones that are having a senior community in it or next to it, working with alumni to create their own enterprises to become change makers. Or we're working with a local government in Nigeria for the replication there, which is also again, kind of a different system that they know within the educational system. And now seeing us coming in. And maybe it will create a change that not just in Nigeria, but in many places where senior communities are present, the local communities, the countries, the Regions might see that, okay, do we still need basically one teacher that stands in front, tells people what is right and wrong, or can education have a different approach that people become the teachers themselves and also for a specific purpose, not just to gain knowledge and skills, but to actually in the end create something tangible like a social enterprise that can create change?

Speaker B: Yeah. I love the way that you've identified this bottleneck and you're very clear at different stages the bottleneck was different. Right. Uh, and now you're saying it's actually now it's a replication game. Right. And we need to kind of like crack that. Um, there's plenty more things we can go. There's many more questions coming to mind, but I'm wary of time. So perhaps, uh, what I'd like to look at is just as we start to wrap up here, is your own personal leadership. Obviously this has been an incremental journey for you. As you said, you took one challenge after another and after another rather than having a 20 year uh, vision from the start. But, but what's an area where you feel you, you know, what's your stretch as a leader? Where's something you're going to need to do differently, let go of something or start doing something different in order to perhaps create or even exceed the ambitious vision that you have for this network? Uh, yeah.

Speaker C: So I think generally I love learning and I'm aware that I know maybe many things, but also many things I don't know at all, even if I think I know them. There's people that can do that much better. So do always listen and collectively drive things forward. And that's still especially a little bit, coupled with a little bit of a perfectionist that I am. The approach that I have to let go of that not everything needs to be perfect, um, but it needs to be. In holacracracy, there's a saying, needs to be good enough for now, safe enough to try and, and from there things will, will evolve and, and develop. And I think also for my own leadership journey, I love um, anything to do that keeps me in balance from mountain unicycling in Uganda to other, um, things like that. Um, and that's also something that many approaches, for example on the African continent, when it comes to things to do with finding your own personal well being, maybe they're not as much or the whole field of psychology developed yet as in other parts of the world. And so that's also something to learn from that. Again, maybe it's not the right approach that we should copy and say, this is again, what you should do, that you need to do meditation like that. Because in India or wherever it works, but finding ways that people can interpret it themselves and develop their own, or finding local strength. And then if it works in one place, they can be the ones suggesting it to another and say, this has worked for us and we can, um, maybe support you to try it out and see if it works for you. And again, so then my role, the role as seen as a whole, is not so much telling people what is right and wrong, what they should do, but rather this kind of facilitation approach that holds it all together, that, uh, asks the right questions, that brings the right people in the right room and so on. And of, uh, course that sometimes goes against a bit the more traditional hierarchical definition of a leader. And even for myself, sometimes it's not always easy to then basically shut up and listen and first understand before offering any ideas or solutions.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, thank you for being open on that. I guess that's my final question then, is, um, what fuels this journey? Right, because you said, you're right. You've had to, like, learn to let go. Right. Like, not be the perfectionist who kind of has control on everything. And it's actually progressively you've stepped back and you've stepped back and you've kind of let this thing fly by making yourself obsolete in different ways. So, like, what's been the. What's the. Kind of the. What's the fire in your belly underneath all of this? Because as you come over, you presented somebody who's very calm and, um, you know, this is just kind of natural, one step after another. Right. But what you've created is extraordinary. And this probably wasn't always an easy journey. There are probably plenty of difficulties along the way. So what's kept you going on this when you could have perhaps found an easier, less extraordinary, but perhaps, uh, less hard work or so forth?

Speaker C: Yeah, first of all, I love what I'm doing. I don't want to do anything else. And what fuels that is, first of all, was this challenge that needed the solution, and working on that. But then over the years, just to see what is possible, how people can transform and what we haven't maybe touched upon. But I want to give one example that illustrates that is what can come out. How do those social enterprises look like and what do they do? And that's really also the driving motivation, inspiration. What else is possible? What else can be created? So, like, one example is a young lady that went through the whole journey that I've already, um, outlined who grew up in the orphanage in 2006. And the orphanage was close to Lake Victoria, which meant a lot of mosquitoes, a lot of malaria, and she suffered a lot from malaria. And then she joined the sponsorship program and then came to Sina after high school. And they aligned that she's not the only one suffering and almost dying of malaria. She's. Because it's the biggest killer for young people, for children below 5 in Africa. And she became basically the solution or the change she wanted to see by creating a social enterprise in Sina that is providing a mosquito repellent soap and other mosquito repellent products, but mostly mosquito repellent soap that they're selling, for example, as a social business model into the tourism sector. Hotels need a piece of soap in every room every day, and that profit is used to subsidize sales into the villages where mothers with young kids needed the most but typically couldn't afford it. So with the subsidies of the tourism sector, they are able to sell the soap into the villages at the same price as any other ordinary soap and have. We don't know how many, but have actually saved lives. And it has been, um, scientifically proven that there's a reduction of malaria cases, and it works. And today they have about 60 employees, their own factory. And the young lady that I met when she was 11 years old today is really a leader that is inspiring thousands of other women across Africa, having spoken on platforms like the World Economic Forum in South Africa and things like that, to, um, be a role model. And that's just beyond words that I could have never imagined that this is possible. And again, it gives so much hope and inspiration to others. And sometimes it's also the indirect impact that, uh, we never consider. Sometimes I go somewhere and then I meet someone and says, oh, I know Sina. And that has inspired me. We've also started to build houses out of plastic bottles, something we have done and is a social enterprise as well, because of what I saw in Sina. And so sometimes, um, it's just the fuel. What next? What's possible? And how can we make the world a better place, which is highly needed.

Speaker B: Couldn't agree more, Ertin. This has been a fantastic conversation, Um, a tour de force, really, of the magic of multiplication, uh, which, uh, my business is called X Quadrant. And the reason I put the X in it was because I believe so powerfully in the idea of multiplying leaders. And you're a living example, brilliant example of what's possible when you really, really go for that. So thank you for everything that you're doing. And what I loved as well is really just that final framing of you started with challenge, and you've kind of moved into possibility. I think it's just a really helpful lens, actually, to look at life through, because often we look at we need to solve challenges, and at some point we can start to go, oh, what else might be possible? What do we want to create at this point? What could we do beyond the immediate challenges we're coming up with? And I think, uh, when people start thinking like that, then you get these 10x vision, 100x vision, thousandx vision, such as the one you're pursuing today. So, um, thank you for this, uh, fascinating conversation. Look forward to, uh, following along on the journey. Uh, thanks so much.

Speaker C: Thanks again for having me. And it was a pleasure.

Speaker B: Thanks, Etiye.

Speaker C: Bye. Bye.

Speaker B: Well, that's a wrap.

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