Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have the ability to transform the business landscape on the African continent. Most Africans no matter how good their business ideas are simply don’t have the means or enough capital to totally make their ideas successful, you will find that many of these businesses run in Africa are not operated in a way to grow their businesses but rather just survive the hush economic situations the owners might find themselves in.
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain, in particular, brings infrastructure that African business owners could only dream about. Things like a secure and affordable payment system to the ability to raise capital, among other things these businesses need to grow and be successful.
With this great innovation, you would think Africans would be doing everything in their power to see how they can use or at the very least see if cryptocurrency can improve their business. But sadly very few Africans actually know about cryptocurrency let alone see how valuable it can be.
Before cryptocurrency can develop African we need to find out why there is no interest for it. I believe these are the main reasons why Africans don’t embrace cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain are very complex concepts to explain
Cryptocurrency and blockchain are just complicated concepts to explain. The technical aspects need you to be familiar with computer science and since it’s a brand new there are few things to compare it to. It does not help that the technology is very flexible and can be used in different industries for different applications. Don’t get me wrong it is amazing that it can do that but when u start giving examples of what the technology can do, you are met with suspicion rather than enthusiasm.
A google search doesn’t help as you are hit with large amounts of information which can be overwhelming. All this work just to understand what blockchain is discourages many potential African users.
Government policies
Governments in many African countries actively discourage their citizens from using cryptocurrency. The reason why they do this can be debated for years but there is no doubt that the citizens are listening to them. they introduce policies which make it difficult to use cryptocurrency in your business and with the difficulties these business owners already face, they don’t want the hustle of find ways around government policy to implement a technology they don’t fully understand.
This forces business to operate their businesses traditionally which we already know is not working out well for them.
Misinformation
There is a lot of misrepresented information which is being stated as facts like if you invest in cryptocurrency you will lose all your money or the only people who used this technology are criminals as they are the only people who would need such a complicated network to move their money or all crypto related programs are scams and you should stay well away from such things.
Bitconnet (a pyramid scheme which use the popularly of bitcoin to scam people) among other scams have been used to discourage people from even looking into cryptocurrency and blockchain. They seem hard-working individuals losing their money and they don’t want that to happen to them so they stay far away from it.
This has the unintended consequence of treating people who try to educate people of the benefits of the technology (people like myself) with suspicion and technology with great potential dies before it can even begin.
Underestimate the power of the internet
Many African businesses will actually understand the power of crypto but will dismiss it because they believe it would only work for people in the developed nations. They believe it will not help their business because no one uses the internet for business purposes. In their minds, Africa is not ready and this is probably the most damaging reason why African don’t use cryptocurrency and anything related to it.
If you have any ideas on how to solve some of these issues please leave a comment, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter or you can follow me on twitter @ayodel6 and we can have a discussion about it.