Our Mission
To empower communities with practical skills, knowledge, and sustainable solutions that strengthen livelihoods, build climate resilience, and inspire innovation at the grassroots level.
Our Vision
A future where communities thrive in harmony leveraging innovation to building resilience, prosperity and wellbeing for generations to come.
Our Values
Community Centered
We listen, learn, and serve alongside communities, ensuring every solution reflects local needs and strengths.
Sustainability
We promote practices that protect the environment, support long-term livelihoods, and build resilience for future generations.
Empowerment
We believe in unlocking the potential of women, youth, people living with disability and farmers by equipping them with skills, knowledge, and opportunities.
Innovation
We embrace creativity and simple, practical ideas that solve everyday challenges using local resources.
Integrity
We work with honesty, transparency, and accountability in all our actions and relationships.
Inclusivity
We welcome and uplift everyone regardless of age, gender, background, or ability ensuring no one is left behind.
Collaboration
We value partnership and shared effort, working with communities, institutions, and stakeholders to achieve greater impact.
Stewardship
We care for the earth as a shared home, promoting responsible use of natural resources and environmental protection.
Who We Are
Since its establishment, and through partnership with local schools and communities, the Sustainable Innovation Centre has provided solutions built around agriculture as a whole, with the aim of economic empowerment.
What began as informal community work in Centrakl Karachuonyo grew, over sixteen years, into a registered community based organisation formally established in 2021 in partnership with Ubuntu International. The mission has stayed the same throughout: community-led solutions, rooted in agriculture, that open the door to economic opportunity.
Anne
Agustine
Ongoro
Meet the SIC team — leading community change from the ground up.
Our Story
Community work begins in Central Karachuonyo, Homa Bay County, long before SIC had a formal name.
Grassroots programmes grow across agriculture, water, education, and women's economic empowerment.
Sustainable Innovation Centre is formally registered as a CBO, in partnership with Ubuntu International.
SIC works alongside communities at the grassroots level in agriculture, education innovation, and economic empowerment.
Our Journey
From the past to the present
Before Sustainable Innovation Centre had a name, it had Anne Okelo. In the mid 2000s, in central Karachuonyo, she began solving problems alongside her neighbours the way communities have always done, quietly and without waiting for permission. There was no office, no registration certificate, no funding proposal. There was only the work itself: helping households get through a hard season, finding water, keeping children in school. It was Anne's drive that turned that informal effort into something lasting, the roots of what is known today as the Sustainable Innovation Centre.
By 2021, sixteen years of that kind of work had earned SIC something it had never formally had: recognition. The organisation registered as a community-based organisation, entering into partnership with Ubuntu. Today SIC continues alongside communities at the grassroots level, in agriculture, education innovation, and economic empowerment, the same way it started, one household, one garden, one school at a time.
Agriculture sat at the centre of it from the start. Permaculture gardens became the first shared classroom, where community members and, later, students at partner schools learned to grow vegetables, tomatoes, and tree and fruit seedlings from the ground up. As the practice spread, it did not stay confined to the gardens. Households began adopting permaculture techniques at home, and what had begun as a demonstration plot became a way of farming the wider community recognised as its own.
Growth brought new pressure. Unpredictable weather and limited production could not keep pace with a market that was asking for more seedlings and more vegetables than the gardens alone could supply. Rather than scale back, SIC scaled up, installing greenhouses and shade nets at three partner schools. It was a turning point: production caught up with demand, and something less expected happened alongside it. Students did not just watch the greenhouses work. They learned to run them, propagating seedlings with real skill, and some began to see farming not as a school subject but as a future they could build for themselves.
Watch Our Story
Well of Dreams
The Journey of Anne Okelo
This powerful documentary tells the story of courage, determination, and triumph. It follows Anne Okelo in the small village of Angiro, Kenya, as she dreams big and finds a way to save the village girls, freeing them from traditional societal restrictions.
— A film that takes you outside your comfort zone and inspires change.
Be Part of the Next Chapter
Every programme on this page is real, running, and community-led. Your support keeps it going.