Africa DAO in partnership with Harmony and Polyon, two leading blockchain protocols, has challenged women to tap opportunities in the decentralized digital currency to bridge the gender equity gap and promote financial inclusion.
With technology rapidly advancing across sectors and industries, it has great potential to benefit its consumers. Gender inequality has been described as a barrier with no exemption in blockchain. Among Polygon’s initiatives focused on social impact are projects that address gender parity.
This follows a three-day Kenya Gender Hackathon event held in Nairobi to discuss gender issues in the sector; the organization said the solutions created through their engagements will help women to verify their digital assets and increase their participation to tackle socio-economic challenges.
The competition, conducted in April this year, brought together 93 participants into 20 gender diverse teams of developers, gender experts, idea-generators, and techs.
“We are really happy to see Smart People coming up to build solutions for women in technology. So, what we actually want to do is to increase blockchain technology in Kenya but most especially to encourage more women to come into this space because there are fewer women in tech but out of fewer women in tech we have fewer women in blockchain,” Rael Kilonzo the event organizer told Metropol TV in an interview.
The Web3 gender hackathon challenged women in the country to realize the importance of diversity in investing in a more well-known area in the technology space. The event also deliberated issues of education, health, business opportunities, gender-pay gap, power and influence.
In the competition, Femcent Kenya, a female-centered financial platform using blockchain to create a secure, decentralized solution for women to access investment options was ranked top, taking home over Ksh.289,000.
Among other top five platforms named for supporting women empowerment included Samaki Zetu, Supa Lipa Kenya, Safe PG and Nabo4all.
Several companies, funds, and foundations including Harmony One, Polygon, Binance and MadNFTs sponsored the hackathon.
Harmony and Polygon co-sponsored a Web3 training workshop, providing participants with a technical and non-technical overview of each protocol. During the five-day training, 72 developers attended, 26 percent of whom were women.
According to the latest Capital Markets Soundness report, crypto assets, which are tradeable digital possessions or forms of money that exist only online, have lately been on the rise globally and must now be given adequate attention. Crypto assets reached an all-time high in global market capitalisation of Ksh. 347.8 trillion (US$.3 trillion) in November 2021.
On February 10, 2022, Kenya published a discussion paper about a central bank digital currency (CBDC) potential, calling for a response by May 20 following the introduction and evolution of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology..
The Discussion Paper examines the applicability of a potential Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in Kenya to ensure informed policy decisions regarding innovations and developments.
This comes on the backdrop of increased digital payment methods that have emerged to facilitate transactions, including CBDC, issued by central banks to serve as money in a digital form.
For the next 4 years, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) will lead in boosting its open platform for assets, identity and assets dubbed ‘Harmony’ to create greater decentralized governance of the HarmonyONE network.
