About Sikia Café

Situated in Uganda’s old industrial town, Jinja, Sikia Café & Crafts is a social enterprise which aims to improve the livelihood of vulnerable persons and persons living with disabilities through skilling and provision of employment opportunities. Established in February 2019, Sikia Café & Crafts (Sikia) is Uganda’s first Sign language Café staffed by the Deaf & Hard of Hearing.

Sikia is founded on the ethos that true meaningful sustainable success of any enterprise can only be achieved when such enterprise delivers a positive impact to its shareholders, staff and the community within which it operates.

It is prevalent in various communities across Uganda that Persons Living with Disabilities are often excluded from decent formal education, and decent jobs. This in turn creates what we believe is a cycle of poverty, dependency and vulnerability. Sikia Café is founded with the aim to break this cycle of disadvantage through the affirmative action of preferential recruitment of persons living with disabilities, or persons from less privileged backgrounds.

Sikia is a Swahili word for “Hear”. Over 90 per cent of the staff employed by Sikia are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Despite the challenges of startup and Covid19 lockdowns, we have had the privilege to witness the positive impact that employment has had on our staff as well as the Jinja Community at large, We have come to realize that a job is not just a job, it is an avenue for one to express their talents and abilities. A job is a tool to dispel the negative stereotypes of our inadequacies. A job is a form of socialization, a form of integration into the community of the working. We firmly believe that a decent job, is a crucial step to independence, to dignity and self-determination.

The strong impact we have observed at Sikia in less than 3 years of inception has reaffirmed our core believe that the social-enterprise model of doing business is one of the best approaches to achieve inclusive social progress. It is also on this basis that Sikia seeks to expand its operations to proving skills and employment to more persons living with disabilities.