I am excited to highlight Africa DAO, a pioneering initiative that is igniting a new wave of Web3 talent and project development throughout our continent. Africa DAO serves as a beacon of innovation, fostering an environment where raw talent is nurtured and impactful projects take shape. Among these projects, StreamSway holds a special place, one that I’ve had the privilege to contribute to. Leveraging Minipay, StreamSway embodies the collaborative spirit and forward-thinking ethos of Africa DAO. Its GitHub repository, accessible at GitHub - Ronexlemon/StreamSway: Streaming of tokens in minipay, reflects the dedication and ingenuity invested in its creation. StreamSway is a testament to Africa DAO’s transformative potential, breaking barriers and opening doors to endless possibilities. As an active member of this vibrant community, I am inspired by our collective journey to redefine the technological landscape of Africa and beyond.
Hi everyone, I’m Dennis Kimathi, a full-stack and blockchain developer currently building on the Celo ecosystem.
My journey in Web3 began in 2022 through Celo Kenya’s codejam sessions. With the help of dacade Celo materials and guidance from Jordan (developer relations at the time), I built my first dapp, a marketplace.
Participating in the Build With Celo hackathon in November 2022 was a turning point. Our project, Tumaini DAO, placed among the top 25 globally, boosting my confidence to continue building in Web3. I actively contributed by creating content on Celo Sage(now Celo Academy) to help new developers learn dapp development on Celo.
In August 2023, I landed my first full-time software development role as a frontend engineer at Silvi, a Celo-based startup in the ReFi space. I’ve also participated in BWC hackathons, recently building Chamaa, a decentralized collaborative social savings platform on Minipay. We’re still developing Chamaa and plan to participate in the upcoming Celo Camp batch 9.
I wholeheartedly credit the Celo ecosystem for providing the platform to showcase my skills and launch my developer career. Funding the Celo Africa DAO will undoubtedly onboard more Web3 developers and increase the number of innovative products built across the continent.
I’ll like to particularly give a testimony as I was one of the many developers that benefited from the previously organised workshops/code jams, and with what I learned from the workshops - I have been able to effectively understand more in celo stack and currently working on a project in stealth mode using the celo social connect plugging
Clixpesa has enjoyed immense support from the Celo community here in Kenya. Back in 2022 when we started more as a research project and our team fairly new to blockchain, we stumbled upon this thriving community where we learnt a lot to help propel us to where are today.
It is through the CodeJams organized by Celo Kenya that we were able to get direct help on how to build the project within the ecosystem, not to mention the immense talent we are able to connect with within the DAO and its events. While our biggest successes have come through the Build with Celo hackathons and the Celo camp programs, we would not be able to utilize this opportunities fully had we not been part of this community.
Kenya and Africa at large has a lot of talent and very good projects coming up but we often are left behind since we may lack resources to fully build to our potential, having a thriving African focused DAO not only brings support closer home, but also enables the community to build together and help each other bring ideas to fruition.
I am heavily in support of both Focus Area 1 and 2 as this typically is what has made our journey worth while. Having a dedicated Incubator locally will not only ensure that Celo gets mature projects from Africa early, but also ensure that builders here have access to the support needed easily. Kenya is thriving with a lot of good talent that the ecosystem surely needs and can thrive from.
The team at Clixpesa have also been able to give back to our community through contributions to projects and also supporting other builders in the community.
Celo Africa DAO is the best way to enable an environment where we can build together and prosper together.
I appreciate the work that Celo Africa DAO is doing. As a web3 software developer, I remember my first encounter with blockchain was through the monthly Celo events that were organized in my country(Uganda), and my first web3 project was actually a Hospital Management Dapp built on .Celo. I have been attending most of the meetups that happen where I have met experienced developers that have really shared valuable knowledge . My wish is to see more meetups happen in my country as they will onboard more talent into the Celo ecosystem
Hi @mabwa @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.
Hurupay is a testament of the good work that the Africa DAO is doing in advancing the growth of the Celo ecosystem in Africa. The support that we received from the team in our early days helped us make great strides in our growth. I am particularly excited about the incubator program as I would love to see more startups built and grown on the Celo ecosystem. Without mentorship and support from the Africa DAO team, we would have struggled to get to where we are. I support this initiative from @mabwa and @Dan_K and the team, kudos!
True, Focus Area 1 and 2 would really help builders in the community and also onboard more builders
Hi @therealstone, Thank you for your response and the prompt to reconnect with ecosystem founders.
We have taken your feedback and also created a form where founders who would like to work with the DAO directly can reach out. Here is the form.
We have also been working with ecosystem projects such as HaloFi and Fonbnk alongside other local projects, and we continue to find more ways of working together and leveraging each other’s strengths.
For this proposal we are keen to work within a scope which allows us to be efficient and effective with our energy and resources. The scope is MiniPay, we are focusing on apps that have launched or plan to launch on MiniPay.
We appreciate your valuable input, and we are open to further discussions and refinements to ensure the Africa Regional DAO is optimally positioned to address the challenges faced by builders in the Celo ecosystem.
Cheers
Best Dao …celo Africa is doing a great work…i support the proposal
Hi all,
I’ve made an initial evaluation of Celo Africa’s proposal using my Regional DAO review template. Based on my review (view the full review here), Celo Africa scores 21/24 points.
The team delivered a lot during their initial proposal in 2023, and there are multiple strategic initiatives, including MiniPay and Celo Camp, which could benefit from additional growth and resources in the region.
Greetings @mabwa and Africa Team for the scoring of your proposal. 
Regarding the new governance structure and following the guidelines provided for Celo Public Goods Funding in CeloPG.eco I would suggest you to update the tittle of this proposal or post a new forum thread with the label of [FINAL] and then we can move forward with the OnChain submission of the proposal.
Once feedback has been incorporated and the forum thread has been up for at least 7 days, signal that you are ready to move your proposal to the Voting stage and update the title of your proposal to include [FINAL]
Hi Juan,
We already updated to Final, its on this thread:
Hi @juanjgiraldoc,
Here is the Multisignature (multisig) account wallet for financial operations:
0xeF88FB545C62226EF0E3304aE411dcCb865319Ee
The Africa DAO extends heartfelt gratitude for the overwhelming support in voting for our proposal. We value the trust placed in us and pledge to uphold transparency, accountability, and inclusivity throughout implementation. We are super stoked for S1 of the Africa DAO. We thank the entire Community for the unwavering support, Together, we will continue to build a more inclusive, equitable, and accessible financial system where everyone prospers.
