COLLATION 'utf8_unicode_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'

Question

I've had a look at the other answers, and none of them solve this.

We have a website running through mysql-proxy to the 2 mariadb servers.

all the tables are encoded using utf8_unicode_ci, but when the web-app tries to do a query, it throws this error.

I am thinking its something to do with the connection charset, but no idea where its coming from.

We are using Symfony2 with ZendDB, which is setting the charset as utf8.

Im totally lost, please help!