Bitcoin continues to make inroads in Africa. One particular African country pushing the penetration of the digital currency is Botswana.

The Satoshi Centre in collaboration with GDG Gaborone and Partners are putting together the first ever Botswana Bitcoin & Blockchain Summit. It is scheduled from 25-26 November, 2016, at the Botswana University in Gaborone.

With the theme ‘Bitcoin & Blockchain: The Only Chance for Africa to Empower her People’, the summit will host 150 people from across Botswana and Africa. Participation is free.

Rationale behind summit    

Cointelegraph spoke to Alakanani ‘Motherpky’ Itireleng, Director of Satoshi Centre on the raison d'être behind the summit. She revealed that it is basically about reaching out to more people with the benefits and usefulness of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology.

“There is something about Bitcoin and the Blockchain technology that makes me push for people to take a deeper look into it, at least not to miss the greatest invention of all times. At first, when I started my journey with Bitcoin (https://motherboard.vice.com/blog/one-womans-quest-to-bring-bitcoin-to-botswana) I was ignorant about what Bitcoin was all about. As I continued the journey to research for my small meet ups in Botswana  and attend Bitcoin conferences, my knowledge on the technology kept on growing and so was the desire to take the technology to the people, especially business institutions, students, farmers, the un-banked etc. I felt the technology will matter in the future. The rationale therefore can be summarized as reaching all with this technology with the hope that we will see amazing developments coming up as a result of this summit.”

Speakers

There is an excellent line up of speakers that include Prof. Charles Evans (USA), Adella Toulon Foerster (USA), Tim Tayshun (USA), Andrew Tudhope (South Africa), John Karanga (Kenya), Philip ‘Akonfem’ Asare & Narigamba Mwinsuubo of Ghana.

Blockchain Academy

26 November the Summit with collaboration of the Blockchain Academy in South Africa will run a training course for developers at the Botswana University. The course is intended to provide developers with hands-on experience to develop applications using the Bitcoin Protocol. It also aims to illustrate to developers the languages and tools can be used to build decentralized applications.

Participants are required to have basic object-oriented programming experience combined with basic understanding of JavaScript and Node.J.

Sponsorship & Exhibition

The Summit is sponsored by HardBTC (Gold) and Playbetr (Silver). According to Alakanani, they are yet to get sponsors locally but they are working closely with the support of the University of Botswana Google Developer Group.

“We are still reaching for more corporate entities to support this initiative. It is the beginning of the growth of Bitcoin and Blockchain innovations, not only in Botswana but the rest of Africa.  As a result we are offering sponsorship and advertising opportunities for businesses and individuals to market their products and services right here in Botswana. Participating in the introduction of Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies in this summit will help open the opportunities for this technology not only in Botswana but also, the rest of Africa.”