TLDR: Create a collaborative strategy for Africa aligning different stakeholders and the community to drive awareness, adoption and growth.

Introduction

In emerging markets, blockchain technology is essential and a chance to leapfrog several difficulties. Africa is one of the places where Web3 can fulfil its full adoption potential where people use the technology for daily things like remittance and cross-border payments.

Motivation

Polkadot has limited engagement and few project developments in Africa compared to newer platforms like Ethereum L2s, Solana, Avax, ICP Network etc

Mission

This proposal aims to build a supportive community of agents representing Polkadot in Africa. There are so many pieces to the puzzle when growing a diverse community. For instance, we would want developers and content creators. How do we achieve this? 

Solutions

• Educational sessions.
• Community engagement and management.
• Ecosystem representation.
• Developer outreach and support.
• Encourage the building of Polkadot native apps and integrations.
• Providing guides on utilising Polkadot native apps and products in the ecosystem.
• Recruit mentors to help out and onboard new community members.

Plan

There would be different phases of development for this 6-month strategy. Please note that these 2 different phases could run in parallel too.

• Icebreaker events (Phase 1)
• Rust community activations (Phase 2)
• Developer workshops (Phase 3)
• Community meetups (Phase 4)

The team

• Bekka - Developer relations lead West and East Africa
• Kratist0s - Operations lead East Africa
• Sanchez - Content creation and community manager
• Victor - Business developer lead West Africa.

We are also the team behind the Polkadot Africa X account and collectively we've assisted to highlight activities by different community members as well as contribute in various capacities towards bringing Polkadot community together online and IRL.

Requested amount:  $92,880

Duration: (Jan - Jun 2025)

We would focus on setting up the foundations for the rest of the year and carry out initiatives properly next year. The full proposal is here.

• Team Compensation - $47,520
• Events (sourced from EB) - $39,000
• Utilities - $30,960
• Transport (IRL events)- $11,400
• Marketing - $3,000

Total (after EB deduction) = $92,880

Regions/Key countries

Our initiatives would be mostly carried out in these countries, we selected 2 countries from West and East African regions.

• Nigeria
• Kenya
• Ghana
• Uganda

Limitations

While our IRL activities will start with West and East Africa regions in select key cities, we still have a broader view to reach out to North and South African regions, support them online and create a website and discord community that caters to all community members from Africa