Thank you @CryptoHuncho for taking the time to read the proposal in detail and for highlighting the most important pieces of our proposal!
With regard to your comments on education, i agree that structures need to be in place, but there is no simple one-size-fits-all solution, which is why we are working with our regional advisors from different parts of the continent. Each of them will bring to us many years of local expertise from their previous entrepreneur or investment experience. All the details are in the full proposal and I strongly recommend you to take a look at their awesome biographies!
Besides working alongside with regional advisors, we have outlined our initial approaches on page 11 of the proposal including but not limited to:
Working with leading colleges across Africa to expose students to web3 technology, careers, and companies
Funding web3 classes across Africa, especially programs that teach technical topics (like solidity/Rust development)
Hosting hackathons, meetups, conferences, and other web3 focused gatherings
Establishing job pipelines between major African technology companies, universities, web3 projects etc.
Developing a grant program to support students exploring careers in blockchain.
Well said @dave Appreciate you using statistics to back up logically. As the region progresses, hopefully we will have more and more data points to help growth expediate.
Thank you for the support @GREG00SE! We completely agree. As outlined on page 12 of our proposal, there are significant benefits for both BitDAO and AfricaDAO to pursue this strategic partnership. AfricaDAO has been very intentional when selecting our partners and investors, curating a board with a breadth of knowledge and experience across various industries and geographies to bring the best of web3 to Africa. We have over 30 investors and local partners outlined from pages 13 - 21 of our proposal to invest, accelerate and educate the next wave of web3 entrepreneurs from the region. With BitDAO’s support we will spearhead innovation and global growth to leapfrog Africa into the forefront of the global web3 market.
Thanks for sharing your personal story with us @metanomic! This is exactly in line with AfricaDAO’s philosophy in unlocking Africa’s potential by providing undiscovered talent with the necessary tools to help them succeed via web3.
We outlined this in more detail on page 11 of our proposal, but in brief AfricaDAO and its partners will integrate with the existing educational system to accelerate the transformation to web3. This includes hackathons, college workshops, meetups and conferences to create a space for likeminded people to share ideas. After identifying the top tier talent, we can leverage our network to establish job pipelines between major African technology companies, universities, web3 projects and provide grants for them to finish their education. This creates a virtuous cycle where AfricaDAO creates a network of alumni that can be tapped on for development of the next generation.
Great question @rahul.dim! To create sustainable talent pipelines in Africa that will drive the success of our acceleration and investment initiatives, we are deliberate in investing into educating the current generation in order to seed the next generation of African web3 entrepreneurs.
We are launching a series of initiatives to make sure we have access to the best talent in Africa. These initiatives include partnering with leading colleges, funding web3 classes, hosting hackathons and other web3-focused gatherings, establishing job pipeline between universities and web3 projects and offering grants and more. We’ve outlined them in more detail in our proposal.
At the same time, we understand that Africa is an incredibly diverse continent with 1.4 billion people and over 2,000 languages. There is no simple “one-size-fits-all” solution for any of the initiatives listed above. Therefore we are leveraging our regional advisors in different parts of the continent. Each of them brings years of local expertise from their prior entrepreneurial or investment ventures (biographies listed in proposal). We hope that through utilizing the aggregated approached listed above, we will properly support the people with the best educational resources to bootstrap web3 unicorns.
Thank you for the support @Greg! Our goal at AfricaDAO is to unlock Africa’s potential by empowering the best talent with the right tools to succeed. We strive to back the best teams across the continent to spearhead web3 adoption.
Thank you for the kind comment @jademont! Fully agreed, I actually mentioned in an interview with Blockworks that we look at building in Africa as a 5-10 year mission. If you’d like to learn more about how we are going to spearhead the development of Africa you can check it out here - Why Crypto is Africa’s Next Big Bet | James Zhang, Jambo - YouTube
Africa is home to the youngest and most tech-savvy population in the world with 75% of the population are younger than 35% and smartphone adoption is at around 50% [1]. This combination of demographic structure and mobile penetration, along with currency instability and high inflation, has driven up crypto adoption across the continent. In fact, according to Chainalysis, six African nations are among the top 20 countries in the 2021 Global Web3 Adoption Index: Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania [1].
Web3 will not only empower the unbanked population with access to financial services, but can also bring so much more economic opportunities to the young and entrepreneurial Africans.
Capital allocation with the correct strategic partners is fundamentally important for any frontier market. As a longtime investor in SEA, I can see that web3 can help developing nations like the Philippines improve. I feel like Africa has the opportunity to integrate even more new systems given the lack of existing paradigms, especially in communication and financial inclusion.
Given your local presence, what industries do you think will be disrupted first through web3 and what solutions do you think may be more challenging for web3 to bypass current web2 solutions?
I like the proposal by the way, it is well-written and very informative!
This is a great proposal. The most important thing in my mind is to support the local entrepreneurs who are from the area, who understand the local culture and the needs of the community. We need to support the next generation of web3 founders from grassroots, giving the necessary resources and support to help them succeed at the initial stage. From there they become self-sufficient and are able to help future entrepreneurs in the long term.
There’s a lot of ways our BitDAO community can contribute besides funding. I see a stellar roster of regional advisers in the proposal—from web3 founders, investors, and software engineers who have spent years and years building in the space. I have strong faith in this team and am excited to see what the future holds.
No question the market opportunity for web3 and BitDAO are enormous here. As a founder in Nigeria and Kenya that has worked in 6 African countries over 10+ years, I can say that the analysis on adoption trends, aversion to local currencies, and huge youth population is spot on. We see constant interest from our users and partners looking to engage in new ways with crypto. Nowhere else in the world is the mass market opportunity for web3 more palpable.
AfricaDAO’s approach – actively educating, partnering, and building a platform to introduce the multitude of early and emerging web3 opportunities to Africans through Jambo, as well as identifying opportunities in Africa through investment in the burgeoning startup ecosystem – has the positioning to capture the enormous opportunities available. There is clearly a gap that needs to be bridged – the startup ecosystem in Africa is thriving but lacking in web3 resources – AfricaDAO has the potential to be the premier investor and ecosystem partner in the space.
Excited by this opportunity - Africa is ripe for Web3 disruption; the focus on educating the people through their academies IMO will provide a sustainable growth trajectory with a loyal customer base. Knowing a few of the Team members personally, I believe they have a strong balance of Crypto natives, gaming experts and commercial acumen which will allow success in Africa where others have struggled
Gemini Frontier Fund is happy to support Jambo and its initiative with launching AfricaDAO. We see the potential for accelerated growth in Africa and think seeding companies and entrepreneurs across the continent will provide the funding they need to propel towards success. We have full faith in the team that has aligned to bring this mission to fruition and are excited to see it flourish.
Hi @tdindefiland, thank you for the support and insight! Totally agree that the ability to identify and source local talent is the key. The level of localization and on-the ground knowledge is what sets AfricaDAO apart from others. We are continually growing our network of experienced regional advisers from different parts of the continent to accelerate the continent onto web3.
We see future collaboration opportunities with existing BitDAO AE’s through P2E with Game7, collaborative education through EduDAO and community owned and scalable web3 applications secured by zkDAO which we outlined in our proposal. AfricaDAO will work with all of the existing BitDAO AE’s to expand their communities to the African continent.
At AfricaDAO, we believe in the untapped potential the African continent has to offer. According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), as of 2017, 22% of Africa’s working-age population are starting new businesses — the highest rate in the world — and 38% of Africa’s entrepreneurs are between the ages of 25-34 [1]. With information like this showcased in our proposal, we are also eager to participate in the development of web3 in Africa!
Hi @AmazingDDY, I really appreciate the time and effort you took going through the proposal and the thoughtful comments!
Africa’s adoption of web3 mirrors that of the Philippines in the early days, but there are also huge differences. If we look at the GameFi space last year, we can see that P2E games played a huge role in SEA due to some tailwinds such as low GDP, lack of job opportunities, great mobile and 4G penetration to name a few. If we take the same value propositions in SEA and compare them to Africa, you will see that Africa takes this to the extreme by order of magnitude. Average monthly income in the Philippines is around $700 ~800 [1], while the average monthly salary in DR Congo is around $200~300. The median age in the Philippines is 25.7 [2] while the median age in Sub Saharan Africa is 18. If the right resources and support are provided to the continent, Africa has even more potential for mass adoption than SEA.
In fact, we can already see that Africa is leading the current technology revolution both from the private and government side. @zkLennox mentioned M-Pesa as a great example of how Africa is using new technologies to get ahead of the global technology curve and @jambojames also brought up how the CAR is adopting Bitcoin as one of their national currencies. Some more innovative use cases for blockchain out of Africa are tokens representing natural resource rights such as minerals[3], land and property registry [4] and even peer to peer energy sharing projects [5]
There is still definitely a space for using current infrastructure as a base and building a complimentary web3 solution rather than outright replacing an existing system to ease transition and hasten integration. AfricaDAO is going to be working with local providers in Africa and leveraging our pooled resources to bypass any current limitations for web3 implementation. Keep an eye out for new projects coming out in this space in the coming years!
Thank you for the support @Connie! Our goal at AfricaDAO is to unlock Africa’s potential by empowering the best talent with the right tools to succeed. We strive to back the best teams across the continent to spearhead web3 adoption.
Immediately starting up AfricaDAO across the entirety of Africa seems rather ambitious given the diversity of each region as you previously mentioned. Why not start at one of the major markets first like Nigeria or Lagos to establish a foothold before going to all these other markets?