DirectEd - utilising stablecoins, smart contracts and decentralised identifiers to unlock the untapped potential of the next generation of African tech leaders to take part in our free coding courses, bootcamps and internships. Meaningful transparency and accountability in a privacy-preserving manner. For a world in which any person can realise their full potential, regardless of their draw in the lottery of life.

Background

My name is Simon Sällström, after graduating with a master's in economics from Oxford in July 2022, I did not want to go on the traditional 9-5 route in the City of London to move around money to make more money for people with money.

Instead, I wanted to pursue a path where I could contribute to building a better world - one in which any person can realise their full potential, regardless of their draw in the lottery of life.

But the charitable sector is riddled with issues. Though most have the best of intentions, they often fall short in many respects: transparency, cost-efficiency and creating sustainable impact through self-sufficiency.

About Us

DirectEd Development Foundation (DirectEd) is a UK-based charitable organisation on a mission to deliver free coding programmes to high-potential under-resourced students in Africa, starting in Kenya and Ethiopia, designed for inclusivity, scalability and economic sustainability.

The goal of our programme is to prepare students for remote employment by equipping them with the most sought-after digital and soft skills on the market, thereby fostering the next generation of African tech leadership.

What Really Sets Us Apart

We are pioneering the use of stablecoins, smart contracts and decentralised identifiers to facilitate milestone-based peer-to-peer scholarships because we believe that the combination of these technologies enables meaningful transparency, traceability and accountability at scale.

Donors learn their impact in the short run through our Student’s Progress dashboard, and in the long run, through rigorous impact reports based on randomised control trial data.

Importantly, we estimate that our programme has an immense impact. For every $1 donated, we estimate that the direct lifetime benefits amount to $130 in higher economic value to the beneficiaries.

Our Vision

By 2025, we envision that our programme has raised the lifetime earnings of our beneficiaries by $10 million, and their local communities by even more. We will have completed our first academic pilot study together with world-leading academic researchers and successfully scaled our partnership schools to span well over 30 institutions across Kenya and Ethiopia. We will have had more than 10,000 students participating in our ground-breaking mobile-phone-based coding course and 1000 students participating in our coding bootcamp, with hundreds of these entering successful careers as remote software engineers or tech startup entrepreneurs.

Who We Are

Our multinational team of contributors, volunteers and trustees come from more than 8 countries across four continents, with 15+ years of NGO leadership experience, 5 Oxbridge Master's degrees, PhD candidates from universities in Oxford and Addis Ababa and 2 Young African Leaders Initiative Fellows. Our advisors are sourced from leading coding bootcamps, universities and impact organisations from all over the world. More than 50% of the core (salaried) team are based in Africa.

Achievements To Date

In October 2022, we signed the first Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a local High school in Kenya - Kagumo High. They ranked 6th in the country in the recent KCSE national examinations. Our CEO Simon Sällström visited the school in November, meeting with the school representatives, and students whilst piloting the onboarding process. In December, we signed an MOU with Kotebe University of Education (Addis Ababa) to pilot the use of decentralised identifiers and develop a highly scalable and accessible coding course for students in Ethiopia. We also did a soft launch of the DirectEd Lions collection and completed the NFT gating functionality.

In January and February 2023, we ran the first coding course pilot with about 60 Kagumo High students. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first in the world to create an implementation of Harvard’s CS50 Introduction to Python that only requires students to have a mobile phone - thus expanding access to these opportunities to the vast majority of students in our target areas. In March we completed our donation portal dApp, NFT gating fully functioning and the student’s progress dashboard that shows donors the progress of the Access Stipend scholars they are supporting.

By the end of April, we will have completed the second introductory coding course, with more than 100 students attending from three more Kenyan partner institutions: Mang’U High, MaryHill Girl’s High and Ngong Road Children’s Foundation. agreements with 2 tech internship partners in the West. These introductory coding courses give all students a chance to learn to code. We also give all students introductory blockchain education so that they understand how to manage the scholarship stipends they will be receiving.

Next Up

We will be running our first DirectEd Bootcamp from May - July 2023. This will be the first time that we will have students participating in such a program thanks to smart contract scholarships! In July, we will also be launching our first pilot in Ethiopia. In September, the first batch of students will start their 6-month tech internship with our tech internship partners. At the same time, we will be looking to enter partnerships with at least 10 high schools across Kenya and Ethiopia.

During Q3 2023, our smart contract will undergo community auditing and public testing on testnet. We will also be integrating decentralised identifiers to enable the verification and issuance of Verifiable Credentials. This means we will be able to verify credentials from students holding verifiable credentials from recognised institutions and issue verifiable credentials.

We are in the final stages of finalising our registration as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) with the UK Charities Commission and expect this process to be completed sometime in May.

Links

DirectEd Whitepaper

Lions Collection Litepaper

Donation portal dApp

Linktree