Year 2020 has been one heck of year globally, with several disturbing events and interesting ones. The excitement the year presents became reduced with the impact of Covid-19 and the global lock down which was both a blessing and a curse as it reduces movements however, increases productivity especially in the tech community.
For us at Web3bridge, we entered the year with the goal of growing web3 drives in Africa and building developers who are key players in the drive for web3 adoption. Our drive for the year is to have 500 active developers onboarded into the Ethereum community in line with the One million dev goal announced by Ethereum Joseph and our play plan was to host both both remote and onsite training program for developers who after their training builds useable dapps that will be resourceful to driving blockchain adoption in Africa and yet meet global standards.
While Covid-19 could not allow us to go onsite into the higher institutions to drive our onsite mission, we maximized the remote avenue and took our positives.
Our Achievements
Just as covid could not hinder the growth in the Blockchain ecosystem, we had a number of achievements recorded for the year;
Web3 Introduction: We successfully introduced over three hundred (300) persons from Africa to web3
Dev onboarding: With the completion of our last cohort, we have supported onboarding of forty four (44) developers into the Ethereum community of developers. A number of these developers are interns, technical writers, bounty hunters and project/product owners.
Consensys Scholarship: Together with Consensys academy, we were able to secure 10 scholarship slots valued at $15,000 for participants of previous cohorts and individuals who have passed through Web3Bridge. Interestingly, we also provided support and motivated others in the Consensys academy bootcamp to success.
Dapp Development: Participants of the cohorts in 2020 developed four (4) dapps and three (3) projects. Three of the dapps were upgraded and absorbed by one of the notable communities in the space, there has been a delay in pushing two of the projects for the community use, however priorities for Q1 2021 is to ensure that these projects are pushed to beta version.
Web2 Introductory project: In partnership with Computer Science department University of Benin, we designed and implemented the web2 introductory program with the goal of supporting no-coders interested in learning coding. The program focused on teaching HTML, CSS & Javascript. The 8-weeks training has over 80 registrations and 30 active students which includes University Professors.
Dev Shop Experiment: Since we are training developers, we decided to experiment running a dev shop where individuals and teams bring their projects for development. The dev shop consists of mentors and students from the cohort who built interesting projects promptly.
Grant: To ensure sustainability of the cohorts, we secured grants from Gitcoin and Metacartel to finance development rewards for cohorts participants
A look into 2021
As we enter 2021, Web3Bridge will be running two cohorts with three major tracks in each cohort;
Web2 Introduction
Web2 introduction track will be Introducing no-coders to Web2 (HTML, CSS, Javascript). The track will be building on the result of the pilot program to increase the impact and the reach of the track
Web3Bridge
Web3bridge track is the core of the program as it focuses on migrating web2 developers into the web3 ecosystem. We will be opening the cohort for one hundred and fifty (150) web2 developers with the goal of graduating seventy (70) developers and a minimum of three (3) projects/dapps.
Web3 Garage
With the number of web3 developers we have trained since the cohort started and those that have been motivated by our vision and have self taught themselves, we are opening up a “Web3 Garage”! The garage will be focused on learning product life cycle, user research, community engagement, marketing and within 12 weeks will be breaking and fixing codes to launch projects/products.
There have been a lot of reviews done on our last cohort with the goal of ensuring an improvement on our activities and program outline for 2021. During our last concluded cohort, we had fifty three (53) signups and a goal to graduate twenty (20) developers into the ecosystem however, we were able to graduate ten (10) developers owning to the fact that a number of participants were evicted because they could not keep up with training, afford cost of internet required for the time of the program or having electricity issues to meet up with tasks and classes.
Moving ahead, we are working on ensuring an improved retention rate for participants by proposing that 60% of the participants be onsite to ensure that they leverage on our facilities and resources or sponsor cost of internet and alternative electricity for cohort participants.
Appreciation
Driving this vision will not have been possible without a number of support we had on the way entering 2020 and in 2020. We are still very grateful to Michael Funkbauer of Ethereum.network who has been our biggest supporter till date. Himself and everyone at Ethereum.network belief in the Africa developer drive vision with us and they have never for a day stopped believing.
Kudos to the guys at Consensys who were early drivers of the OneMillionDevs goal Kames, Billy, Robbie and big ups to Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi of EPNS who were great support to sustaining Web3Bridge. Words cannot measure how much help Kunle Taiwo and the entire CDIN team were to the launch of the project and no way we can forget the impact of Clement Hugbo & Oluchi Enebeli of Crevatal, they both did our early designs and website development and curriculum design.
Attending ETHCC earlier in the year brought so many eye opening opportunities and afford us to connect with interesting people and being on the Kernel genesis block was all worth it as it connects us with amazing friends, mentors, advisors, a team member and the Ethereum community as a whole.
Christopher and Ken of ESP justifies that the ESP program is more than releasing funds as they were there to checkmate, support and review our effort in growing Web3Bridge one cohort after the next. The team over at Gitcoin also deserves a shout out and we salute the work done by MetaCartel, thanks to $Alex for the introduction and for Yalor for believing in the vision.
Conclusively, we are going to be running a community on telegram going forward, the goal of this community is to have a general chat among blockchain enthusiasts in Africa. The community will feature various weekly learning and earning opportunities, general blockchain Q&As, job posting and network.
Big ups to the Web3Bridge team! Everyone has contributed immensely to the success we have so far.
Connect with us;
Telegram: https://t.me/web3bridge
Twitter: https://twitter.com/web3bridge
Email: ayodeji@web3bridge.com
Website: https://www.web3bridge.com/