Hi @CeloAfricaDAO @Dan_K @Umarsebyala @chuta @ccolas2014
Thanks for putting together such a well planned-out and thorough proposal for the Celo Africa Regional DAO - it’s great to see such an enthusiastic and thoughtful team pulling this together.
My main question to the proposal team is how you see the Africa Regional DAO interacting with projects that already exist in the Celo ecosystem, and if you see that can be incorporated with the proposed programming? One of our biggest challenges as an ecosystem is that while we are rich with impact-first projects that operate throughout the African continent, this comes with the reality of limited budgets on every projects community and developer advocacy activities. How could this program be built in such a way that addresses the reality of this problem head on? This is a recurring issue.
I am speaking in my role as the Executive Director of GoodDollar, the basic income and financial education protocol - this is currently the largest and fastest growing project on Celo, which has brought over 100k users to Celo in the past year and driven a significant contribution of the accelerating usage numbers. Operating a full protocol on a non-profit budget means all our budgets go to product & engineering - very little is left over for marketing and community. I’m sure many other builders in the ecosystem could chime in that they face the same operational issues - Halofi, ImpactMarket, Masa. Impact work doesn’t bring the big budgets 
For example, our operating budget has around $30k/year for community management; there is no budget for hackathons, dev advocacy, etc. The budget being requested here of the Regional DAO, however, is real money that has the potential to make a difference.
I’d challenge this Regional DAO group to think about how they can address the real challenges faced by dapps & builders on Celo that have working products with a real proposition, but lack money to market it into the relevant communities. Ultimately, if this Regional DAO can better leverage what already exists and is working on Celo to accomplish their goals, I think this is what will have the biggest benefit for the holistic ecosystem.
Some ideas that jump out would be for the Incubator and Developer program to solicit challenges / RFPs from select Celo projects as a core part of the programming. Would be awesome to use these forums to both inspire people and get useful stuff built that will drive usage.
For the Community Management part, I’d like to learn more about what are the plans to train the relevant community managers and expectations for what they actually do in their capacity as community manager for each country.
I’d also like to see this proposal oriented towards more strategic KPIs - # of new wallets opened & transactions. My own experience is that attendance figures in community work is a really misleading indicator of success – countless crypto events show that people will come to events for t-shirts and pizza but its not a meaningful indicator of adoption.
Looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts on this.