Plan A -Web3 x Africa economic self determination with Yoseph Ayele

Sovereign Frontier

Strap in as we take you on an interesting conversation featuring Yoseph Ayele.

Yoseph is on a mission to create a borderless world. He invests in Web3 and blockchain innovations building the future economic infrastructures in Africa. He is also bridging global Web3 communities with grassroots ecosystems in Africa.

Previously, Yoseph co-founded and ran the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and the Global Impact Visa - a new immigration program that attracted 500+ of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and investors to New Zealand. This program was ran as a startup, through a public private partnership with the New Zealand Government. He also helped grow Inflection, a technology startup in Silicon Valley.

Yoseph grew up in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya. He studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Victoria University of Wellington

In this episode, we discuss the intersection of web3 and Africa's economic self-determination, with a focus on the potential for decentralization to address the unique challenges and opportunities facing the continent.

Yoseph Ayele led a month-long learning trip to Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia with a group of prominent figures in the web3 space, including Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyagotchi, and others.

Throughout their travels, they participated in a wide range of events, meetings, and roundtables, connecting with hundreds of founders, developers, artists, students, DAOists, and community builders. They found that while it is still early days for crypto and web3 adoption in Africa, the pain points that these technologies can solve are immense.

Three key areas where decentralization can make a significant impact include:

Trust intermediaries: In areas where trust intermediaries are weak or non-existent, transaction costs skyrocket.

Simple finance: Communities in Africa are building the basic financial rails for local economies to thrive, including saving, lending, borrowing, insurance, payments, billing, and more. Simple DeFi is better than complex DeFi, as it allows for financial inclusion and addresses major gaps in the current system.

Access to credit: Access to credit for retail and small businesses is an immense gap in Africa, with lenders charging exorbitant interest rates. More attention needs to be paid to this issue, and more brains need to work on it.

In addition to these areas, there are many other projects underway that seek to leverage the unique strengths and challenges of the African context, including the expression of African culture and creativity with NFTs, building incentives for reforestation and climate action, and even the creation of a new digital nation-state.

For Africans to build a borderless economy on-chain, decentralization needs to be affordable and scalable. The Ethereum mainnet has been largely inaccessible, but layer 2s have the potential to change that. However, the Ethereum community has been largely absent in Africa, with antiquated visa requirements preventing Africans from attending global events. To build strong foundations for web3 in Africa, we need more global events on the continent and more investment in local talent and education.

Ultimately, it is Africans who will build the decentralized applications for the 1.4 billion population, and the problems they solve and the variables they optimize for differ greatly from those in the West and Asia. A lot of bottom-up building is happening across Africa, and decentralization offers a real value proposition. We salute all the African builders, educators, community and events organizers, translators, and those educating policymakers who are building the paths for others to walk on.

Disclaimer:

None of what is shared in this show is financial advice. Only the opinions of the individuals that make this show possible. Remember to always do your own research.

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Project/Guest links👇🏾

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