Farida Nabourema teaches people how to break free with Bitcoin

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Farida Nabourema is a Togolese activist born and raised under a military regime. Since childhood, Nabourema has seen his grandfather and father oppose the harsh dictatorship, sometimes landing in prison; and in no time, she found herself doing the same. Nabourema has been an activist for over 20 years now and is passionate about liberating people from unjust systems, this passion leading her to bitcoin.

Nabourema was looking for a tool to help counter government surveillance of how activists and opposition leaders received money, which consequently led to confiscation to prevent them from operating something they been doing for decades. In the process, she came across bitcoin. This currency, which offered a private way to transfer money without government control, so fascinated her that six years later she pledged to work in the bitcoin space and help other Africans ‘to explore. According to Nabourema, bitcoin is political and is a tool to help facilitate human rights by freeing people from abusive and exploitative monetary systems. She believes that monetary independence is the start of many political struggles and that a system that gives people the ability to move money around without government interference is a foundation of freedom.

In December 2022, Nabourema hosted the Africa Bitcoin Conference, the first and largest major bitcoin event to take place in Africa. The three-day event saw some of the biggest names in the global bitcoin scene, including Twitter founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey, Ray Youssef and Obi Nwosu converge in Accra, Ghana.

Tell me about the African Bitcoin Conference. How did the idea come about?

I attend many bitcoin conferences in the west and realized that there are not enough African voices in the space, even though Africa has the fastest adoption rate in the world and that she was literally the one that propelled the currency. Africans were not adequately represented in these spaces for multiple reasons, one of the main ones being that these Western countries generally required entry visas, which they sometimes refused to holders of African passports. It made me realize that we didn’t have to wait for others to organize their conferences and invite us, and we could organize our own and talk about the work we do on our own soil.

It is essential for us to organize our own conferences on the continent that bring together people working in this space, be they technologists, researchers or activists, bringing them together to discuss the challenges, opportunities and directly adapted innovations. to our realities in Africa.

Would you say that you have made it your goal to achieve your goals with the conference?

I believe I did. One of the things we wanted to achieve with this conference was to make people realize that bitcoin is serious business and not an online scam as some describe it. It is a technology on which many things can be built. We wanted to open people’s minds to the reality of bitcoin as a legit technology with real people working every day to make it better and more flexible. From the feedback we’ve received, people have been impressed, especially those who’ve never really been in the bitcoin space.

Another thing we wanted to achieve was to introduce bitcoin from an angle beyond what people hear about in the mainstream: the human angle. I am an activist as are the rest of my team and we wanted to focus more on the utility of bitcoin and how people can use it to improve their lives, not the price. We wanted to organize a conference that prioritized panels on his philosophy and why it is imperative to break free from exploitative monetary and financial systems, rather than just discussing how much it costs and how much you can get out of it. This is something we have accomplished successfully and our attendees have really enjoyed it.

Image source: Africa Bitcoin Conference While Africa is leading the way in bitcoin adoption, much of it stems from a desire to grow money and invest. Is it enough to start? Or do you think profit-driven adoption is detrimental to bitcoin’s long-term growth?

Human beings are naturally self-interested no matter what they are doing and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, I come from a space where I believe people shouldn’t circumvent certain values ​​and principles just for profit. In the work that we do to educate people about Bitcoin, it’s important to us that we are able to communicate these values ​​and principles to people so that they understand that for this currency to be sustainable and profitable over the long term, there is has errors that we should avoid.

Some of these mistakes include preying on the vulnerable through scams and hoarding excessive wealth for yourself while everyone else is getting poorer. It matters to me that we remind people of the good nature of bitcoin and that the reason it was invented was that the founder(s) wanted to end systemic mining. The idea of ​​making a profit is a good reason to get into bitcoin, as long as you don’t destroy our society and exploit others.

Do you see massive bitcoin adoption across Africa? Do you think we can achieve decentralized bitcoin in Africa despite heavy interference from intermediaries and government institutions?

The reason we continue to rely heavily on intermediaries and government institutions today is that we haven’t reached the point where everyone has enough to be able to extend it directly. The more people use it, the more we get to the point where we no longer need these institutions to convert bitcoin into cash. It will take time, but we will get there. We keep expecting bitcoin to do the same thing as cash, forgetting that cash has been around for hundreds of years while bitcoin has only been around for about 20 years. In terms of growth and adoption, bitcoin has seen the fastest growth of any form of currency used globally, including gold and cash, which is a positive sign. Bitcoin is growing and we need to give it space to fully form. Currently, I don’t see the lack of structures as an obstacle but an opportunity for us to create solutions and innovate to make it more accessible. We will get to the point where it will be as easy to use or even easier to use than cash.

Bitcoin is both the innovation with one of the fastest technology adoption rates in the world as well as the best performing asset of the decade. The number of people using the currency is growing rapidly and is expected to reach 1 billion by 2025, with the speed of adoption even higher than the internet.

There have been concerns about the technical know-how required to transact bitcoin. Do you think this will be a huge challenge for us in Africa?

I think that’s a huge misconception. I taught people with no formal education how to use bitcoin and they got it all figured out in 30 minutes. People who are not necessarily educated know how to use market calculators and how to count their money. They know how to use smartphones with apps like TikTok and Whatsapp, so why can’t they use a bitcoin wallet? Bitcoin is about as easy as having a smartphone, downloading a wallet, and scanning to make payments. It takes less than five seconds and you don’t need to understand technology to do it.

It’s important for people to understand how bitcoin technology works so they don’t get exploited, but that shouldn’t deter anyone from using it. People use cash without knowing how central banks work or how and why money is printed.

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