Bitcoin in Africa: Three African Projects Receive New HRF Grants
The Human Rights Foundation is funding three Bitcoin projects active in Africa: BitSpenda, Bitzed and Hack4Freedom, focused on mobile money and training.
More than 500 million satoshis, or over 5 BTC, will fund 16 projects focused on Bitcoin and decentralized technologies. Africa has a visible presence in this latest round of the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund: BitSpenda, Bitzed and Hack4Freedom are directly active on the continent. Cross-border payments, mobile money, self-custody and training for female developers are all on the agenda.
Bitcoin in Africa: BitSpenda tackles costly transfers
BitSpenda addresses a distinctly African problem: sending money between two countries often remains slow, expensive and dependent on several intermediaries. The issue is already evident in the growth of digital cross-border payments in Africa, where new infrastructure is specifically seeking to shorten these routes.
The platform connects Bitcoin with mobile money in Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda and Ghana. Users can send BTC from a Lightning wallet. Upon arrival, the recipient directly receives the corresponding value in their mobile-money account, in local currency.
The recipient does not need to manage Bitcoin themselves.
The model is non-custodial and does not require a traditional account on the platform. The HRF grant is intended to help BitSpenda expand this infrastructure.
This represents a markedly different use case from the classic narrative surrounding BTC. The issue here is not speculation on its price, but using Lightning as a settlement rail between several African monetary systems.
Bitzed connects Zambian mobile money to Bitcoin
The same logic applies in Zambia, with one important difference: Bitzed focuses on buying Bitcoin.
Mobile money is widely used there. Yet accessing BTC still often requires a bank or a centralized exchange. Bitzed aims to remove that intermediary layer.
The service allows users to use an existing mobile-money account to buy bitcoin and then receive the funds directly in their own Lightning wallet. The Human Rights Foundation explains that its funding should notably help the project reach more Zambians excluded from traditional banking services.
Self-custody is central to the model. It simply means that users control their own keys and therefore their BTC, rather than leaving a platform to hold them on their behalf.
This autonomy naturally brings its own responsibilities. Recent vulnerabilities discovered in certain Bitcoin wallets have highlighted that poor key management or vulnerable software can be costly.
BitSpenda and Bitzed nevertheless point in the same direction: connecting the infrastructure already widely used in Africa to Bitcoin, rather than asking users to start from scratch.
Hack4Freedom invests in African female developers
The third African-funded project is not directly focused on payments.
Hack4Freedom is an intensive two-week program created by Brianna Honkawa d’Estries, founder of Evento. Female developers learn to build with Bitcoin and other free and open-source technologies.
Sessions are being organized in Lagos, Nairobi and São Paulo. The grant is intended to fund the events and certain travel expenses in order to broaden women’s access to this technical training.
Africa also appears indirectly in another grant. My First Bitcoin, an open-source educational network active in more than 40 countries, including Uganda, aims to increase its number of trained educators from around 60 to 120.
Overall, the Bitcoin Development Fund says it has distributed $12.2 million in BTC to 383 projects across 70 countries since 2020. This latest funding package also supports WalletScrutiny, open-source Bitcoin tools, Nostr, decentralized mining and censorship-resistant communication systems.
For Africa, the three selected projects above all convey something concrete. Bitcoin is moving closer to mobile money, education and everyday payments. This is precisely where the debate between centralization and autonomy becomes far less theoretical.
The continent probably does not need another crypto trading app. Infrastructure capable of connecting wallets, mobile money and local currencies may prove much more useful.
À propos de l’auteur
Lydie Musekwa
Lydie Musekwa, enseignante chercheuse passionnée par les nouvelles technologies, plonge dans l'univers des cryptomonnaies avec un regard analytique et innovant. Depuis sa découverte du bitcoin, son parcours s'est orienté vers une exploration exhaustive de la blockchain et de ses applications. Armée d'un esprit critique et d'une soif d'apprendre, elle s'attache à démystifier les concepts technologiques complexes pour ses lecteurs, tout en scrutant les dernières tendances et avancées. En tant que rédactrice, Lydie s'engage à partager des connaissances précises et à jour, faisant le pont entre le monde académique et la sphère digitale en constante évolution.
