About Company

Situated in Uganda

Sikia Café & Crafts is a social enterprise that aims to improve the livelihoods of vulnerable persons and persons living with disabilities through skills provision and employment opportunities. Established in February 2020, Sikia Café & Crafts is Uganda’s first Sign Language Café staffed by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

Sikia is founded on the ethos that meaningful, sustainable success of any enterprise is only achieved when such enterprise cultivates 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, conservatism, and vulnerability. Sikia Café believes that we can reverse this cycle of disadvantage through the affirmative action of excellent recruitment of persons living with disabilities, or persons from less privileged backgrounds.

Sikia is a Swahili word for “Hear”

Over 80 percent of the staff employed by Sikia are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Despite the challenges of startup and COVID lockdowns, we have managed to show the world that the most efficiently hardworking staff at Sikia is the PWD (Persons with Disabilities) community.

We have come to realize that a job is not just a job. It is an avenue to be exercised, their talents realized. A job is a tool to dispel the negative stereotypes and ridiculing of a PWD. It is also 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 in independence, dignity, and self-determination.

The strong impact we have observed at Sikia in these three years of existence has reaffirmed our core belief that the social-enterprise model of doing business is one of the best approaches to achieving inclusive social progress. It is also on this basis that Sikia seeks to expand its operations to providing skills and employment to more persons living with disabilities.