Bitcoin Dada: Redefining Financial Freedom for Women Through Bitcoin 

Speaker: Marcel Lorraine Atieno

Conference: Africa Bitcoin Conference 2024

Video: https://youtu.be/7LsIK40NcK0?si=ZVTJa9Viug1D142Y

I am Marcel Lorraine, I’m the founder of Bitcoin Dada. And essentially what Bitcoin Dada is, it’s a nonprofit organization that helps to empower the African female through financial education, and we leverage on bitcoin to do that. So I’m going to go into that a bit later, but let’s start. So I’m going to start by acknowledging that the majority of us in this room are Africans and you’d agree with me when I say being an African is hard, right? Is it? But then I’m going to continue and say being an African female is even harder.

There are certain challenges that we face as African females and I’m here to share with you these challenges and have in mind that these challenges come actually in different forms, shapes, and levels. This stems from social economic hurdles as well as gender based discrimination. The first thing that I want to talk to you about is for example in Kenya currently we have seen the rise of femicide. It has been on the rise since 2017. Last year we had about 152 killings, this year for the last three months a female has been killed every single day. So every day we have news that this particular woman was killed at this particular point and you know what’s surprising about it, only 15% of these female die in the hands of the stranger, meaning 75% are killed by people they actually trust and loved. This was a report made by one of the largest media platforms in Kenya which is Nation Media so like I said I’m going to talk about the challenges and just help you understand what we go through as women. I want you to imagine with me these certain scenarios.

Imagine being in a position where you cannot afford sanitary towels that by forcing you as a female, as a young female to actually engage yourself with older men risking early pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies or infections. Imagine yourself being in a scenario where you’re paid 77% less or 45% if you’re lucky and you’re in the urban centers. Imagine a case where you’re in the same economy you have the same responsibilities, but you have a lack of substantial collateral. Imagine yourself being or seeing your male siblings go off to get higher education while you get to get married off at an early age. Now of course for the ones who are in the urban areas this might not be the narrative and for the majority of you, you might not necessarily have had to experience this but in one way or another when you go outside the urban cities in Kenya or even in Africa, in other African countries this is the case.

So how does Bitcoin come in? For me before Bitcoin there was not really like a chance for actually for us females to get true financial freedom or independence or even a voice. Through Bitcoin Dada we are trying to change that narrative and telling our communities not just as the females that there is a way that we as African females can also contribute by building Africa with this new technology. How do we do this? At Bitcoin Dada we have training every Tuesday and Thursday. We meet every Tuesdays and Thursdays just to learn about financial education which is the most important thing because for you to understand Bitcoin you need to understand the flaws of your current financial fiat system.Every Thursdays and Tuesdays we accommodate mothers, wives, working professionals, businesses, just to help them understand where the world is going and what’s wrong with the current leadership or the government or you know the control system that we are currently in.

We’ve been doing this since 2022. We’ve done seven cohorts and we came up with Dada Devs. Dada Devs is a new product. We just recently graduated our first set of developers and like Femi said and he keeps on stressing this, that we need to build solutions for Africans by Africans, right? The African population, this is something that I should have mentioned when I started this speech, but the African population is composed of half if not more of the African females. That means we make most of the transactions. We’re paying the bills, we’re taking care of the children, we’re doing most of the transactions that are happening at home. It’s us the women who are doing and I believe you will agree with me when we say that the majority of our mothers are actually the pillars of our homes. True or true?

When we are building solutions we want to have input that is coming from somebody who actually understands the challenges, right? So that is where Dada Devs comes in. We’ve been building applications that actually cater to our needs not just as women but also as Africans. Last but not least is the mentorship program which I feel there’s a big gap when it comes to educators. We normally just teach people bitcoin is freedom, you know, bitcoin is the next thing hodl, for the next 10 years, don’t sell your bitcoin, right? But then what happens after they’ve learned this? We introduced a mentorship program where they will refine the skills that they already have.

Remember everybody that comes into this space has a different skill set so for example we have writers, we have developers, we have entrepreneurs, we have investors as well. So we get bitcoiners and we’re very lucky to have support from bitcoiners. We have Okin in the house, Okin who’s been in space, thank you so much for being one of our mentors. Of course we have Femi Longe who’s also joined us several times, we’ve had Jeff Booth, we’ve had Jessi, we’ve had Vlad. I think I saw Vlad somewhere and several others. We have had Renata from Fedi and so many others who’ve actually helped us fill in that gap. By doing this we’ve seen that there is a change. So the beauty about the mentorship program is that our ladies can go into the bitcoin’s ecosystem, the tech space or even the larger community and get employment and that is very important. You just don’t teach people what Bitcoin is and at the end of the day they go back, they’re still poor, they’re still struggling and they’re still dependent on their fiat. I want to share a couple of stories that really stand out within our community and these are not the only ones but they are representative of what we have been able to do. 

For us at Bitcoin Dada is not just about the African female, it’s about making the community around us better. We try to include everybody and especially the underprivileged. We’ve been able to work with this school from Kibera slums. For those who don’t know, Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa where we actually donate basic hygienic products as well as educational materials. Every bitcoin donation that we get during this fundraising period, it helps to keep these girls in school to avoid them getting taken advantage of and every time you donate to Bitcoin Dada you’re essentially helping the young ladies stay in school. I’ve seen her, she was really smiling at me. Like I said the mentorship program helped these ladies refine their skills and be able to actually get employment into their space. I would like to highlight one of the brilliant minds that we have or we’ve had in the Bitcoin Dada space, she’s called Sharon. She’s right there. She works for Btrust. I believe her bosses are here, Abubakar. She works for Btrust and when she joined Bitcoin Dada she really didn’t know where to put her skills into so through the mentorship program she got a job at Btrust where she gets paid in bitcoin and now she thrives and also tries to help other ladies along. We’ve had a lot of females also getting employment in the tech space which is a plus for us.

I would like to highlight a new project. We have so many projects that are coming up with the Bitcoin Dada ladies. I would like to highlight BitBiashara by Roslyn. Basically what BitBiashara is, she onboards merchants so if you’re here this is your first time in Kenya or even if you’re Kenya and you’re wondering where can I go to spend this bitcoin of mine or how do I or how do these people who actually accept bitcoin find it. The best person to approach would be Roslyn from BitBiashara. She’s been doing an amazing job. They recently had their first merchant meeting and you can follow them on Twitter as well. So we are basically creating bitcoin circular economies.

Last but not least is the African solutions that I’ve been talking about we’ve come up with a few products that we are currently building and I’ve highlighted SatsFlow reason being is because we are launching it today and we are launching it today we have a workshop at 2 p.m. at the TBD, I would encourage you to come and see not just SatsFlow but other products that we’ve been working on. We have a very controversial t-shirt and I would like one of the ladies to just run really fast here cause I want everybody to see this. 3 2 1 not fast enough but yeah so this is not our logo but I felt like Maxis do anything for attention and I was like, we are also women we can do worse and this is it. So if this does not make you get to a workshop, there’s something wrong with you. Thank you Edith. Edith is our community lead from Uganda.

On the Africa Solutions, we have had a couple of projects coming up. So we have the SatsFlow, we’ve had pay with Sats, we’ve had edu Bitcoin, we have Tando, we have Impact donate so like I said if you want to learn about more these projects please show up at our event later on at 2 p.m. In the past two years since we started we’ve had a huge impact and the reason why we’ve been able to scale is because the challenges are so many and for Bitcoin Dada we do not victimize Ourselves, right? We know the problem is there but we try and come up with solutions that can actually help us instead of sticking to victimization level. 

We’ve expanded to 11 different African countries. We’ve had job placements for the ladies, we’ve trained over 500 female and 200 youths, we have collaborated with universities to bring them financial education and just to introduce bitcoin into the universities. Wealth accumulation which is a very strong point because if you’re African you know African females have no right to inherit property unless they really work their ass off and actually buy their property for themselves. With bitcoin this is really important for us because with bitcoin you can start accumulating your wealth with even just $1, right? 

We have had solutions built for Africans by Africans which I just talked about. Creating Bitcoin circular economies, which is very important, like Femi said, sitting on Twitter and just saying hodl hodl, I don’t think we’ll ever get to that hyperbitcoinization level by just doing that. We need to go out into the community and reach out to the people in a more relatable way. We’ve had mental health awareness so we work with a professional so it’s not just about our financial well-being but the overall well-being of these women.

We have collaborated with universities and I must add here that we have had support from a product such as Bitnob, I don’t know if the Bitnob guys are here, we’ve worked with them.Thank you so much. We’ve worked with Bitnob to do activations in universities. We’ve also worked with Machankura as well and then lastly a community approach. I just want to stress on this when I say Bitcoin for us is not just a digital currency it’s a tool that will liberate us as Africans from the financial constraints or the financial chains that have been long imposed on us. Please let’s use Bitcoin as it is, as it suits us as Africans and not just copy pasting everything that we see from the west.

As I leave the stage I want to leave with a quote that really resonates with me and it says, “I am not free while any woman is unfree even when her shackles are very different from my own.” The reason why I chose this quote is because a lot of people come to me and ask me why do you do what you do? What do you gain from helping these women? I believe whether you’re female, male, white, black, Muslim Christian, if any of us at some level, we are caged, at some point that will also affect us. It really doesn’t matter oh I’m living a good life these people having problems, those problems will definitely trickle to you at some point so it’s very important to understand that we need to do something as a community as the Bitcoin community at whatever level that you can and as I leave for my African sisters who are in this space whether you are a dada or not I would like to say that I might still be learning but I’m definitely taking you along with me.

Thank you.

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