Digital Skills for Youth: How Sinai Kukiriza Is Removing Barriers

Key Takeaways

• Access is about more than teaching a skill. For Sinai, opening doors to the digital economy also means addressing barriers like internet access, electricity, computers, and the cost of participation.
• New nonprofits face a difficult funding paradox. Funders often want proof of impact before investing, while early-stage organizations need resources to build, test, and demonstrate what is possible in the first place.
• Small signs of possibility can keep the work moving. Seeing young people go from never having touched a computer to earning money with digital skills has helped Sinai stay connected to why the work matters.
• The people doing nonprofit work need support, too. Sinai has found that connecting with peers who understand the realities of the sector can make deeply demanding and sometimes lonely work feel less isolating.

Nonprofit work often begins with noticing something that feels impossible to ignore.

For Sinai Kukiriza, that meant watching people he grew up with slowly disappear from the educational path he was fortunate enough to continue. Today, at 23, the software engineering student and founder of Code and Smile Foundation is working to create another path forward for young people in rural Uganda, one built around digital access, practical skills, and the possibility of imagining something different.

Seeing Technology as a Way to Remove Barriers

Sinai’s nonprofit journey is closely tied to his own experience growing up in Uganda.

As a child, he studied alongside many other young people in his community. But as he moved through different levels of education, the group became smaller and smaller. By the time he reached university, only a few of the people he had started school with had made it that far.

Many of the others, he says, found themselves unemployed, doing casual work, or with opportunities largely limited to the communities where they had grown up.

That stayed with him.

As Sinai became more interested in technology, he began to see it as something more than a career path. He saw a tool capable of removing some of the barriers that had kept people he knew from accessing opportunities.

Technology gave him the ability to imagine something and then create it. It also introduced him to people and networks he might never otherwise have encountered.

That possibility became the foundation for Code and Smile Foundation.

Creating Access Where Access Has Been Limited

Code and Smile Foundation works with young people in rural Uganda to build digital literacy and pathways into the digital economy.

For Sinai, teaching digital skills without addressing the barriers around them would not be enough. Some participants come from families living on less than $2 a day. Reliable electricity, internet access, computers, and the cost of data can all stand between a young person and the opportunities technology might provide.

So the organization is working to build community innovation hubs equipped with internet, electricity, and computers, while providing training and support to help young people move from learning skills toward earning with them.

The response to their first program showed Sinai just how significant that need was.

The team initially expected perhaps 10 or 20 applications. They received around 200.

They ultimately selected a cohort of 60 young people. About 72 percent, Sinai says, had never touched a computer before joining the program.

Within a few months, participants were creating posters and logos, building websites, and finding ways to earn money using their new skills. By the fourth month, Sinai says roughly 40 percent had earned at least some money from what they were learning.

But one of the most meaningful parts of the program comes later.

Participants are asked to teach someone else something they have learned and to think together about problems in their own communities that technology might help address. One group began working on an application intended to help farmers combine their goods and share transportation to reach better markets.

For Sinai, those moments are what keep the work moving.

“When you get to look at all those ideas getting to happen just because you had the ability or your conviction just pushed you to make it happen for a young person, I think that is what pushes us to see tomorrow.”

The goal is not simply to teach someone how to use a computer. It is to create enough access that young people can begin imagining what they might do with it.

The Difficult Reality of Building Something New

That possibility exists alongside a much harder reality: new nonprofits are often asked to prove their impact before they have the resources to create it.

Code and Smile Foundation recently celebrated its first year. Sinai is proud of what has been built, but he is also candid about what that first year required.

Funders and potential partners want numbers. They want evidence that a model works. But gathering that evidence requires someone to support the organization while it is still testing, learning, and building.

As Sinai describes it, everyone wants to see what has been accomplished, but far fewer people want to fund what it takes to get there.

For a young organization without a financial cushion, that creates a difficult cycle.

Charging participants is not an easy answer either. If lack of resources is one of the barriers keeping young people from accessing technology in the first place, asking those same young people to pay for the program could recreate the very barrier Code and Smile is trying to remove.

Much of the organization’s first year has therefore been bootstrapped, with the team searching for alternative ways to fund the work while continuing to serve young people.

Sinai does not pretend they have figured it all out.

“Every day is a journey to try and see how you get things done,” he says.

It is a familiar tension across nonprofit work: holding onto a mission while also figuring out how to resource it.

When Nonprofit Work Gets Lonely

There is another challenge Sinai names just as openly: this work can be lonely.

People outside the nonprofit sector do not always understand why someone would continue investing so much time, energy, and even personal resources into something without a clear financial return.

For Sinai, explaining that conviction can sometimes feel almost impossible.

That is part of why spaces like The Nonprofit Hive have mattered to him.

Through weekly conversations, he has met nonprofit professionals living and working in different parts of the world. They may begin as complete strangers, but Sinai says it often takes only a few minutes before there is a sense of recognition.

The organizations are different. The countries are different. The circumstances are different. But many of the pressures underneath the work feel remarkably familiar.

“You get to talk to that someone who you did not know but you actually know,” he says.

That feeling of being understood matters when the work itself is difficult to explain.

Over time, some of the people Sinai has met through the Hive have continued supporting him beyond those initial conversations, sharing his work and staying connected. Other conversations have offered something much simpler, but no less meaningful: thirty minutes with someone who understands.

For Sinai, that has become a kind of safety net.

Building What Comes Next, Together

There is something fitting about the role community plays in Sinai’s story.

His work in Uganda is about giving young people access to tools, networks, and possibilities that can expand what they imagine for themselves. His experience in The Nonprofit Hive has reminded him that the people building those opportunities need connection too.

Neither happens in isolation.

Sinai is still early in his journey, and so is Code and Smile Foundation. There are funding questions to answer, programs to strengthen, and many more young people than one organization can currently reach.

But there are also young people using computers for the first time, earning money from skills they only recently learned, teaching others, and beginning to build solutions for their own communities.

Sometimes that is enough to see tomorrow a little more clearly.

And sometimes, having someone beside you who understands why you keep going makes it easier to get there.