Spread Plutus through Africa

Impact:

How does this proposal fit into this challenge?

Wada's Cameroon hub is strategically placed in Central Africa in a bilingual country (French and English) making it the perfect launch point for Wada's larger multilingual educational initiative. This initiative will be lead by the Cameroon hub, and will therefore have a heavy emphasis on making all curriculum and materials developed available in both English and French (as a starting point). 

How will this campaign add value to our ecosystem?

We will be launching our educational curriculum in both French and English (and will seek to find partners along the way to offer this in as many more languages as make sense). Also we will be taking a project based learning approach (see other proposals for specific projects we will be teaching through developing together as a growing team). 

Outlook and future challenges?

With this proposal we are seeking to develop a framework and curriculum that will be shared throughout Wada hubs and will be taught both online and in person (based on needs addressed by local hubs). We will be working on our project based curriculum in conjunction with other projects to train new developers through project development. As we expand and bring more developers onboard we will also expand our outreach campaigns to include other languages specifically local languages so as to engage the whole community into our problem sensing. It is important to our core mission to listen at a local level and provide solutions for and by the people, therefore this language component will be KEY in Wada's future outlook. Our main challenge we anticipate is getting people to buy into the change brought about by the functional programming paradigm. We think that through addressing people in their local/native languages we can more easily tackle this issue.

Feasibility:

Reference (Past successes):

Wada has been organizing monthly meet-ups across our hubs, spreading awareness and introductory education on Cardano, Project Catalyst, and Blockhain technology as a whole. We have already established active hubs in: Ivory Coast (French), Ghana (English), Nigeria (English), Cameroon (French & English) and Democratic Republic of Congo (French) that have been participating in these programs.

Roadmap:

1. Define and structure curriculum to train the trainers. In this phase we have selected the support and resources for the trainers, and also secured some great relationships with advanced senior Haskell developers willing to help. We have also conducted a lengthy research about the necessary notions of the subject to master in order to build an enterprise ready solutions on the Cardano Blockchain. 15 June - 14 September (completed)

• Phase 1: Learning Haskell base: 15 Sep - 14 Dec**(completed)**
• Phase 2: Plutus & advanced notions of Haskell used in Plutus: 15 Dec - 14 March 2022
• Phase 3: Plutus practice (smart contract development through project based training) 15 March - 15 June 2022

2. Train the trainers (in progress ...) In this phase, we will implement a project based training approach, using this as a chance to start designing and conceptualizing our other related proposal s. As mentioned in the curriculum, we've started with our Haskell base training, and we have completed our first phase and are looking into starting the second. The first phase consisted of an intense Haskell learning journey using the following resources:  

• Learn Haskell Programming from First Principles by Christopher Allen & Julie Moronuki. All of our solutions to this book are posted on github: https://github.com/WADAlliance/haskell_training/tree/master
• Learn you Haskell for a Great Good by Miran Lipovaca
•  www.typeclasses.com

3. Implement regular meet ups to engage developers: This will be the phase where we scale-up our community of developers and entrepreneurs, leading up to the final curriculum development and also selection for our Wada developer team. The subjects we plan to teach are the following: Haskell, Plutus, Elm, Distributed Ledger Tecnologies (DLT), Cardano blockchain, Self Soveireign Identity (SSI) & Decentralised identity (DID), and Software Architecture and implementation. The meetups will be run in parallel to both the trainings and Hackathon activities.

• Discord server Wada Devs set-up (complete)
• First round of invites for developers and entrepreneurs (In progress ...)
• Meet up launch (09 December)

4. Hackathon sessions. We plan on providing regular mini courses leading up to our monthly or bi-monthly hackathon sessions (with mini prizes) in order to spark deep interest in Cardano and Plutus. (Starting end of January...)

• Monthly / Bi-monthly hackathon sessions

• Mini prize packages (through fun on-chain games and online live coding challenges using Code Pad)

• Offer mini courses leading up to Hackathon sessions

• Short videos to make more easily digestible content around specific concepts

• Quick checks/quizzes following videos

5. Define and create a curriculum and content for our developer training program. The meet ups will give us the perfect ground to collect ideas making sure we are connecting developers, entrepreneurs, and local communities to ensure the mental model of our solutions make sense within the local context. (Starting 15 May)

• Define clear objectives / goals
• Define requirements for the curriculum 
• Define and create learning content 

6. Launch program across Wada Hubs (completion of the program will include an examination and a Wada endorsed certification) (September 2022)

• Formalize developer on-boarding for the first course launch
• Elaborate a schedule and offer parallel campaigns to launch curriculum 
• Follow the schedule, evaluate participants, deliver certificates

7. Expansion: Wada's main activity consists of outreach and helping proposers through the submission process. The support we provide needs to have a pathway from funding projects to their implementation. Wada intends to be at that conjunction having our developers equipped to design and implement solutions on Cardano so that we can seamlessly connect funded projects to developers. 

 Affiliated Projects: Specific projects to guide our learning (project based learning) and additional outreach initiatives

• Nation Building Dapps: Lost |&| Found https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Lost-Found/383626-48088
• Boosting Cardano's DeFi: Djangui: Local Savings Account Mgmt https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Djangui-Local-Savings-Account-Mgmt/383394-48088
• DAOs  Cardano: Bees Delivery DAO https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Bees-Delivery-DAO/383418-48088
• Mini/Low-Budget Dapps & Integrations: Small Change Wallet https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Small-Change-Wallet/382218-48088
• Accelerate decentralised identity: Dev. Journey into DID Paradigm https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Dev-Journey-into-DID-Paradigm/383664-48088 (Need transition and better wording)
• Community Events: DLT adoption via clubs+hackathons https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/DLT-adoption-via-clubs+hackathons/381318-48088
• Seeding Cardano's Grassroots DeFi: 300 Plutus Trained Women by 2025 https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/300-Plutus-Women-by-2025/385111-48088
• Improve and Grow Auditability: Auditability through film and media https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Auditability-through-film-and-media/385141-48088
• Multilingual Resources: Scale-UP Wada's Translation FRENCH+ https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Scale-UP-Wada-s-Translation-FRENCH+/381310-48088

Core Team & Roles:
Wada Hub Trainers & Coordination:

• Manfo: Cameroon Team Co-Lead, Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (F#, Haskell, Elm), Multilingual (French, English, Italian, Ngiembo)
• Nkalla: Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (Haskell), Mathematics teacher (Education Systems Engineering), Multilingual (French, Italian, English, Mbo)
• Arcel: Senior Software developer in Closure 7 + years experience, Project manager, Multilingual (French, English)
• Megan: Wada Cameroon Hub Co-Lead, Central Africa Coordination Lead, Wada core team member (Education and Event Lead), Math & Physics teacher, bilingual (French & English)

 Wada Network: 

• Wada devs: This is our core educational initiative that will be launched through our Cameroon hub but also leverage our network of Wada Devs that we will be training in Plutus and Haskell to support the development of other projects and also make a solutions that can be applied to other countries within our network.
• Wada marketing team

Budget:

• Team motivations (trainers $500 ea per month x 6 months): $9 000
• Curriculum development inc. video and podcast, hosting and production: $3 000
• Hackathon prizes: $3 000
• Documents & resources: $1 000
• Marketing & Advertisement: $2000
• In person Events logistics: $1500
• Misc. other motivations: $1500

Auditability:

What success looks like:

Consistent group of devs and entrepreneurs attending meet-ups and engaging in Wada projects. Shareable curriculum template for all of WAda's hubs. Video content produced by main trainers, and discord server for discussions and questions.

Key Metrics:

• Prior to funding (what we will wrap up this year): 3 fully equipped trainers, launch of informal monthly meet-ups aiming for 10+ total attendance
• 3 months post funding: launch of informal Haskell support/mentoring meet-ups, 12+ regular dev signed up and attending regularly, 7+ entrepreneurs signed up and attending regularly
• 9 months post funding: Launch of formal Haskell and Plutus training program, 21+ devs signed up, 12+ entrepreneurs signed up, 9+practical projects funded for us to work through as part of our project based learning approach
• 12 months post funding: 90+ devs signed up, 50+ entrepreneurs signed up