The Built With Bitcoin Foundation (BWB), a non-profit group in search of to supply “humanitarian assist, powered by Bitcoin,” has constructed a expertise heart in Kumasi, Ghana.
The aptly named “Bitcoin Technology Center” (BTC) will concentrate on finance and expertise schooling, and goals to “foster a secure atmosphere to study.” The middle’s official unveiling takes place Thursday, on the heels of the African Bitcoin Conference, which is being hosted just a few hours away in Accra. BWB is hoping to teach and prepare at the very least 400 residents throughout the first yr of operation, in response to a press launch supplied to CoinDesk.
The middle’s location isn’t any coincidence. Kumasi is dwelling to certainly one of Ghana’s largest and most prestigious universities – Kwame Nkrumah College of Science and Technology (KNUST) – ranked 2019’s “best university in Ghana and West Africa” by media agency U.S. News & World Report. BWB hopes the area’s repute for stellar technology-focused schooling interprets into excessive curiosity in the Bitcoin Technology Center’s applications.
“If a neighborhood already has a college, nevertheless it would not have the sources wanted, how are they ever going to learn to use Bitcoin,” mentioned Yusuf Nessary, co-founder and director of BWB, in an interview with CoinDesk. “So we thought to ourselves, what if we construct a freestanding multi-room, co-op and incubation heart, the place neighborhood members can come any time of the day?”
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The middle will supply an introductory Bitcoin course in addition to finance, entrepreneurship and laptop programming programs. BWB just lately collaborated on an identical venture – the Bitcoin Ekasi Center – in South Africa. Each initiatives search to determine round bitcoin economies the place people obtain and make funds in bitcoin as they’d with conventional fiat foreign money.
BWB funded the venture with assist from Ghana’s Edwinase neighborhood, Blockchain Foundation Africa, and members of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. The native communities got here collectively to donate the land, whereas the construction was constructed by fellow Ghanians who have been compensated in bitcoin.
“It’s a peer-to-peer transaction, amongst friends, throughout the neighborhood, with the intention to assist…future generations of that neighborhood,” Nessary mentioned.