$148.31 crowdfunded from 53 people
$310.86 received from matching pools
Direct Donations for Education and Development.
We utilise stablecoins, smart contracts and decentralised identifiers to unlock the untapped potential of the next generation of African tech leaders by providing on-chain scholarship and resources for our tuition-free coding 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 is 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.
We 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.
In May-July, we completed the inaugural DirectEd Bootcamp. This will be the first time that we will have students participating in such a program thanks to smart contract scholarships! You can read more about the success in our newsletter here: https://directed.notion.site/June-July-2023-Newsletter-c567f3330075418596b19bb28b35ee0d?pvs=4
We have now opened up our smart contract for public testing on testnet.
Next Up
We have been accepted as the first-ever UK charity to utilise blockchain technologies for facilitating international charitable funds. We are in the final stages of finalising the documentation. The UK Charity Commission will be publicly announcing their decision sometime in Q3 2023.
In late September, our first batch of students will be entering paid internships with tech companies (all Web3) where they will undertake training over 6 months! One of them is Tally, one of the leading DAO tooling companies in the Ethereum space (https://www.tally.xyz/). Optimism is using Tally for their governance.
Links
DirectEd- p2p on-chain scholarships for coding bootcamps in East Africa History
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accepted into Web3 Community and Education 1 year ago. 53 people contributed $148 to the project, and $311 of match funding was provided.
People donating to DirectEd- p2p on-chain scholarships for coding bootcamps in East Africa, also donated to
