Ethereum The African Opportunity

Transcript

[Music] and uh it's an enormous privilege to be here um I'm not going to give you a technical talk I'm going to just tell you a little bit about the operating environment and the opportunity across the continent of Africa but specifically in Kenya where I live and work and run a small fintech micro investment business I thought best to start off with a global view of Africa by night and just start off by looking at where the lights are

and where the lights are not and that probably portrays the most powerful image of the opportunity and perhaps of the social mission that awaits us all if we so care so my name is Wayne Hennessy Barrett um I'm the CEO of Ford Le Capital I'm also very privileged to be on The Advisory Board of ethereum um 4G capital is a micro Investment Company we provide very small loans between $50 and $500 for one month specifically to grow businesses we loan within 24 hours using mobile money only and PES or AEL money completely

unsecured and we only lend to people who are self-employed and trying to raise themselves and their households out of poverty it's a touch Tech model relationships are very very important everywhere but particularly in Africa but the technology makes it scalable and makes it standardized and drives quality we put the customer at the center of everything we do and we operate a relational model where Stan and bansy here for example who work in our Wang Gigi Branch to the northwest of Nairobi will look after a portfolio of maybe up to a, customers within their territorial area and ensure that they provide a support network for them so they can grow their business with the

means the credit facility but also the ways micro Consulting and business training which are included as wraparound services for our customer value proposition so I'm just going to cover a little bit about the context of what we're doing here and how it can apply to there I'm not going to go over too much old ground we're all here because we know and we believe and we understand in what ethereum can do and what the blockchain can do but if you imagine this world where trust is no longer a prerequisite where you don't get charged to use a middleman to guarantee that your own data is yours and is secure and

your own money goes where it's meant to be you're looking at some very very exciting prospects the story of Africa up until now has been a challenging one a lot of people instantly think of negative associations disease War conflict hunger backwardness that has indeed been the case to a large degree in the 70s the ' 80s the '90s Africa was not a compelling choice as an investment destination why is this for a number of reasons but people adapt to the rules and to the contexts in which they live if you were growing up and living in a largely Lawless

environment why would you do anything other than cut corners and hustle to try to get the best for yourself and your family if by paying tax you were in fact just rewarding corruption when the police are still going to shake you down or the roads or the infrastructure don't work then why would you do that if your support networks are entirely reliant on people from your own tribal group or ethnicity then you're going to adopt clan-based thinking and you're going to follow the people who look after you and you're going to look after the people who follow you so how do you change this the solution has to come from the bottom up the reality is the story is changing and has changed markedly all the

indicators are improving if you take your lead from the broadcast media you could be forgiven for needing your shoelaces in belt removed by the end of the day to prevent self harm it's just an unremitting diet of bad news but if you take a more macro view there is few conflict on the continent in fact globally infant mortality is improving education in literacy is improving the technical Revolution and the technology Revolution is penetrating faster and further than ever imagined before so the African century is upon us people understand this the fortune 500s and 100s are now amongst us and they're

investing deeply McKenzies are in Nairobi every Big Blue Chip big four company is in every major African City and the opportunities for what we believe in what we can do are frankly enormous there are over 1 billion people all with genuine custom problems the agricultural sector alone could feel Feed the World the power opportunities sustainably through solar and other geothermal for example are almost Limitless together with South America the continent of Africa is one of Earth's lungs so forget all the negative connotations Africa has always been a net contributor to planet Earth the reality is now that we can maybe do it

in a more Equitable way the innovation in the human capital story is on the March what I really want to bring home to you is the share power of the humanity there of the people who live by values and keep smiling through adversity and displaying a level of resilience which is frankly humbling every day and I'm thinking of my customers so if our big dream is internet 3.0 maybe an even bigger dream is business 3.0 if business one was feudal barter economies Dark Ages stuff business two was Italian Venetian florenti intermediation the

beginning of credit the beginning of intermediaries and third party trusted agents the may maybe business three is peer-to-peer operation where you own your own data you own your own money and actually you have the right to put it exactly where you want it to go rewarding genuine value creation and letting history judge those who aren't quite there just an idea of scale it's big it's really big you can fit all of China into the land mass of Africa you can fit East and West Europe you can fit Japan you can fit India you can even put Plucky Little Britain onto Madagascar over

there in the corner okay it is colossal there is no such thing as Africa it is as diverse a place as any in the world between east and west North and South anglophonic frankon banto there are so many different subcultures individual environments contextual analyses that need to be done but there are Universal customer requirements that are there crying out to be solved so there is a clear need now to service the need of these billion OD people to establish scalable reliable sustainable things which is the power of what we can do so mobile money a little bit on that I mentioned that we everything on Essa if you're not familiar with Essa I'm

afraid you're about 9 years late it's basically money by SMS okay it's run by safaricom they developed the system with a dfid grant it is now emulated by a number of other Telco companies and it is on the march in Africa it is secure it's transparent it's instantaneous and it transforms low-level cash transactions by removing the need for physical cash which of course is vulnerable to corruption to theft and all the other issues as well as the accounting in the handling Kenya is the leading country in terms of mobile money adoption anywhere in the world people pay each other by zapping smss to one another on their phone we lend to our wonderful customers from mobile tablets

in the field directly to their phones within 24 hours they repay Us by zapping it back on a pay bill number our system instantly notices it and we're able to pick it up so imagine you're operating a world where you don't need Trust imagine you're operating a place where you can see exactly where things are going and you can set up a business using a distributed application that you can access from the Serengeti or indeed anywhere else and you can put your knowledge-based value anywhere in the world this is even before we get onto Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies this suest using Fiat currencies so a practical example we are fintech micro investment we've got a great core banking system proprietorial cloud-based it begins in the field where I'll ask

you if want a loan I'll credit score you based on your personal economics I'll geotag you take your picture that fires through to somebody else who make sure everything happens correctly the money gets to you instantly after we've done our due diligence you repay it you get a follow on loan it's great it's wonderful we love it we're raising now to scale across the rest of Africa if there's any investment interest please find me afterwards but it's a very very exciting space but we want to do more our problem is like any credit credit industry is that we need to feed the machine we're call constantly raising in order to on lend to scale to increase our financial inclusion footprint that normally involves private Equity rounds and all the rest of it with an ethereum architecture we could potentially take donations debt

financing Equity options from anywhere in the world and on lend that directly to our customers investors can see exactly where every dollar goes specifically to point of use and back again that's very valuable and that's very exciting we can collaborate within a wider ecosystem where with people like order Orga sorry we can do more accurate credit based risk scoring based on the reputations people build we can help with individuals creating their own reputations through the conduct of their businesses and give a much fairer kind of dynamic to their lives within this ecosystem there are all these other applications who have spoken here or will speak later who can

do enormous things in Africa and aside from doing our own thing we do our best to be the ethereum champion certainly in Nairobi and across Africa also a little bit more of that later but the possibilities as we know are virtually Limitless but for the people actually there now who are learning about ethereum they're the people who unlock solutions for their own communities so how do we make it happen well last week I'm delighted to say that we sponsored the first Nairobi ethereum Meetup which was a magnificent success it was a lot of fun that's Andrew kbe my CTO taking the MinGa coding school in Nairobi through the initial startup within two hours these guys had downloaded the GitHub and they had started building their own smart

contracts Tech investors take note coders run on muffins no muffins no code never underestimate the power of the muffin so watch out Pi Piper because nairobi's on the March what else can we do keep promoting keep talking keep connection keep promoting the ecosystem maximize the uptake this is our own effort at getting onto the ethereum project we're working on it make the business case Drive the technology let the technology unlock the opportunities for the business cases and keep Connecting People okay everything that we do is about people all right the

technology connects people and it connects ideas all right so keep communicating when we reach out to you please answer up help us along the way we'll do the same if there's anything we can do to help people understand or enter Africa in any way all right and let us all work together to do this that's my f magnificent CEO FMA and one of our wonderful branch managers Edith and machakos all right it's a very very exciting space that we're in so please by all means all questions welcome um I fly back to nairy Monday morning contact details freely available thank you very much [Applause]