Africa Blockchain Developer’s Call Series Initiative to Hold a Blockchain Bootcamp and Hackathon in Tanzania – BitcoinKE

by Arthur · October 19, 2022

Despite progress in the African blockchain ecosystem, there is the trivial problem of minimally qualified African developers targeting available employment opportunities, with blockchain projects being outsourced to non-Africans. This has been a problem that has had a negative effect on the degree of adoption, the degree of employment and the content of the developed solution, which makes the solution unused by localities.

As a way of optimizing African developers with the aim of bringing in more talent and grooming them to the required standards, Africa Blockchain Developer’s Call Series Initiative (ABDCS) set up a bootcamp starting on 31 October 2022 for students from Tanzanian universities, with the theme, “Empower and encourage homegrown experts and professionals to create our ideal digitally transformed ecosystem.”

The program will be organized by Africa BIOT Labs in collaboration with Sankore 2.0, and ICORBPtogether with these six host universities:

State University of Zanzibar (SUZA)
University of Zanzibar
Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT)

Institute for Financial Management (IFM)
College of Business Education (CBE)
University of Dar es Salaam (UD)

University of Dodoma (UDom)

The ABDC series, a pan-African initiative targeting training and certification of 5,000 blockchain professionals and 1,000 blockchain developers from universities, target to equip developers with necessary support and encouragement and provide them with various opportunities for either self-sufficiency or employment in the space after training, certification and a successful hackathon. The initiative also aims to build blockchain and crypto communities with over 70,000 active participants.

Aims and objectives of the program

The aim is to lift the digital transformation in the United Republic of Tanzania with more focus on DLT applications to provide solutions, establish opportunities for the developers and presence for the brands with the following objectives:

Increase the developer pool as a resource for employment opportunities and referrals from African developers for African projects

Increase the use of blockchain technology across all sectors, across the continent
Take a large market share in digitization and safe sharing of space in Africa
Improve developer employability in Tanzania and Africa at large

Increase the number of certified blockchain professionals among students
Increase distributed solutions and research into other uses for DLT through incentivized hackathon competitions

The program will be in two different stages:

Bootcamp and training sessions
Hackathon and pitch session

The training will last for at least 3 months after which proof of completion will be provided. The bootcamp will also have physical and online workshops on all blockchain professional courses, and developer mentorship sessions.

Some of the courses to be completed include:

Blockchain technology and innovation
applied cryptography

Hash functions
Currencies, tokens and stablecoins
Consensus mechanism

Interoperability, decentralized model and consensus mining
Enterprise blockchain, etc.

Alongside blockchain courses, there will be training in frontend development, UI/UX design, adobe graphics creation and import, prototyping and previews and design. For this session, students will be trained by Paul Otieno (Sankore 2.0 Backend Developer), Emeka Agara (Africa BIoT Labs Ui/UX Designer) and Mayowa Adeniyi (Africa BIOT Labs Frontend Developer)

Also present are skilled blockchain tutors such as:

Asst. Professor Johannes Dowe – Head of core course programme
Prof. Amando Boncales – Northern Illinois University – USA

Asst. Professor Regis Prado – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Asst. Professor Raul Aragonez – University of Texas at El Paso – USA

among many others.

Rounding off the activities will be hackathons and pitch series where interested startups will pitch their business ideas to both international and local audiences with potential investors to win prizes and grants.