Grow Africa, Grow Cardano

The Cardano community is heavily based in North America and Europe.

Growth elsewhere requires our support and initiative as a community.

A wide spectrum of people across Africa, or from Africa, coming together and forming teams to grow our ecosystem with tools provided by us.

• The number and quality of funded proposals originating from Africans themselves.
• An increasing number of Plutus Pioneer graduates from Africa.
• Greater and more economical communication between African members of the Cardano community due to infrastructure improvements.
• A higher number of Africans involved with the Catalyst community.
• Solutions created by Africans to problems that people all over the world share.

In Africa, raising the awareness levels of regular people about blockchain technology and the Cardano protocol should be a priority for the Catalyst community. With this challenge, our community can provide funding for those on the ground to build upon their awareness of the Cardano protocol. Doing so will allow blockchain solutions for African problems to come from Africans.

Within our community we have some outstanding people in Africa that I've met who are working with us to grow the ecosystem. Yet infrastructure and funding to enable them to work more easily with one another is still lacking. Let's give our fellow community members a funding category they can point to within their local communities as a means to take part in this revolution of technology. In doing so we will be enabling our ecosystem to make improvements within African communities.

The overwhelming majority of stake pools are based in North America and Europe. The Cardano protocol will be much more resilient and productive for people all around the world when the Catalyst community steps up and intentionally funds communities in every region to build out our network in a more geographically decentralized manner.

Addressing these issues in Africa and other parts of the world directly through funding challenges such as this gives them access to our community and our resources,  and thereby a means of support as they engage with the Cardano ecosystem and work to empower their neighbors in taking advantage of this powerful technology.

I'd like to be clear that there is no attempt on my part here to earn any reward for this proposal. I do not believe it needs a team for autonomous people to be able to make proposals that help people from this region to take part in the Cardano ecosystem. Teams will continue to form organically, as they have been for the past year.

I trust the community to make constructive comments and I trust the gradually improving assessment process to weed out charlatans.

The amount of funding I am proposing equals 6.25 % of the total available for Fund 7. My suggestion is that this is a nice percentage to use as a guide for future rounds when funding increases for all of the challenges that focus on specific regions.

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of $25K. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. $27,500 will be rounded up to $50,000.