As of March 2022, only 21% of crypto owners are women and of the 12 top crypto companies in the world, only 5 are led by women.
Women hardly speak about their finances with families and friends and this hampers their ability to learn and venture into new financial markets.
A survey by BlockFi showed that only 9% of women feel they understand cryptocurrency.
Another study conducted by LongHash in 2018 found that among 100 blockchain startups, only 14.5% were female employees, and 7% were managers.
While these numbers are worrisome, it is fortunate to know that there are organizations changing this narrative.
These organizations provide educational resources for women to overcome the challenges of financial dependence.
One of the organizations on this step is Ekolance, an educational and recruitment platform that helps professionals from emerging countries, especially women to start working in Blockchain.
In a chat with the Co-founder, Modupe Ativie, we learnt how the platform is offering structured training for the new blockchain career paths and connecting the trained professionals to employers.
A brief background
In 2018, I started trading in cryptocurrencies alongside my husband merely as an enthusiast. That same year was the beginning of the crypto bull market.
Moving forward to 2019, I found that there was a technology behind cryptocurrencies and this led me to begin studying more about blockchain technology.
In 2020, the lockdown happened and that was when I finally took out time to study more in-depth and began to understand more use cases for the technology.
This gave me better insight and I finally understood the power of this technology, afterwards, I started networking internationally, trying to find people who knew more about blockchain.
I was so intrigued that I felt that everyone should know about blockchain and I began to sell affordable blockchain training later that same year, I started handling blockchain projects internationally, however, I must state here that I don’t code, but I have access to a team of coders.
Moving on to 2021, I started attending a lot of meetings globally, and in many of these meetings, I would sometimes be the only woman or even the only black woman. I remember one of the meetings that I attended.
Raj Kapoor the founder of the India blockchain Alliance mentioned that he, alongside someone from the Disney Dragon chain, had formed the Global Blockchain Women Alliance and had started promoting it in India.
He asked if I would like to lead the efforts in Africa for women and I gladly accepted the offer, because for me it’s all about passion for technology, and trying to get more women into the sector.
In 2021 also, I got selected for the DLT talents program for women hosted by the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center.
It was an 18-week program where I had the opportunity to network with female developers, entrepreneurs, and educators from all around the world.
For me, education, and awareness was still the strongest point for me, but, I also got excited about other things, which came up as a result of my interactions with other blockchain stakeholders in Nigeria and Africa.
Just to mention, I was excited about the eNaira when I first heard about it.
I even wrote an article on it, titled, “Nigeria, from cryptocurrency ban to CBDC in nine months”, I thought the eNaira would be an avenue for the government to be more crypto-friendly, but that wasn’t the case.
Fortunately, people like Mr. Adedeji Owonibi, the founder of the first blockchain hub in Nigeria and bodies like SiBAN (Stakeholders In Blockchain Association of Nigeria) are in talks with SEC and members of the CBN and we are hopeful for some favorable news soon.
Currently, I am involved in more than one project in the blockchain space, I am the co-founder of Ekolance, an amazing training and recruitment platform targeted at people from emerging economies.
I am also the African hub leader for the Global Blockchain Women Alliance and the Vice President of SheFab – the female empowerment arm of the FinTech and blockchain Association. I also sit on several advisory boards on NFTs and FinTech companies.
Women are still few in this space and this mostly means one woman may end up doing a lot, this is the reason I am trying to get more women informed and aware.
In about five months, since inception, we have a community of over 1400 people and the reason this is small is that we are reaching out to professionals, people who already have a measure of competence.
This is important as criteria because we want to be able to present them to international companies.
We believe that people can get foundational training on their own, and then they can come to us to upskill and focus on specific career paths.
We have separate training programs for community managers, content creators, and solidity developers, and very soon, we’re going to include many more courses, including building and offering these programs in the Metaverse.
Should we be worried about the fewer female developers?
If there are fewer female developers in the blockchain space, is it a problem? I don’t think it’s a problem. The only thing is that there will not be balance in the sector.
For the sole reason of balance, I think it’s important that more women should be involved. We talk about sustainable development goals, gender equality, and female empowerment, and this is why every sector should be equally represented.
There is a quote by one of my mentors in blockchain, Raj Kapoor, the Founder of the India Blockchain Alliance and says “it is belief and not the ability that makes women and girls think that blockchain is not for them” So It’s not an issue of whether they can handle it or not, it’s just the bias that comes with their gender, that misconception is what clouds their minds.
In our training sessions at the Global Blockchain Women Alliance, what I start with is a renewal of the mind, to let women know that the technology is global, it’s for everybody, and what we intend for women to achieve is the same thing that any man anywhere can achieve.
The technology sector has been thriving so far, even though there are more men, but I believe we will do even better, we will move even faster in technology. If we have more women come on board, the sector will be balanced.
How is Ekolance fulfilling its mission?
In Ekolance, we are doing this by offering training programs in the most demanded blockchain professions, most blockchain training available is focused on developers and we have even checked to confirm that Ekolance is the only blockchain training organization focused on emerging countries that train in specific blockchain professions.
We want more women to see these possibilities and currently, we have over 500 women enrolled as community managers, and content creators in our program.
This isn’t far-fetched because blockchain and cryptocurrency information is controlled by social media, which a lot of women are interested in and have a flair for.
In our solidity developer camp, we had about 20% of females in the first cohort, but generally, including our other courses, about 40% of our population are women.
The program isn’t gender-specific, however, we have reduced the barrier to entry for women and it has helped. For instance, we have had more female applications for the role of community manager than males.
Ekolance offers its training for free, what’s the catch?
We consider ourselves an ESG startup, which means that we are focused on providing educational and financial inclusion.
The cycle does not end with just training. After we train people, we connect them to global employers, offering them the opportunity to work in high-paying jobs and improve the quality of their lives.
My dream is to see that a competent woman from an emerging country can earn as much as a competent man from the developed world for the same quality of work.
Now the blockchain space is so demanding that sometimes employers are willing to pay 100% of the annual salary for a developer, as a hiring fee, but we don’t charge that much.
Our revenue model is focused on charging the employers, who hire the people we train for free, and maybe sometimes we could get sponsors, who sponsor our training programs, even though that hasn’t officially happened yet.
Milestones
The first course we ran was the Solidity camp. It was a 13-week program, and only just rounded up at the beginning of August from May when we started.
For the people in the Solidity camp, we had almost 20 matches for jobs, over 200 people applied and we started the camp with about 60 people. The cohort ended with about 30 people following through till the end.
For our community managers, we recently rounded up a course with them and they are currently getting matched to employers. We are also still looking for more open opportunities for them.
How Global Women Alliance and Ekolance is working together to bridge the gap?
Global Blockchain Women Alliance is something that I have been doing for much longer than Ekolance. I encountered the challenges of getting women to believe in the possibility of blockchain technology.
90% of women in my age bracket I speak to hold negative reservations about blockchain’s most common use case, cryptocurrency, however, I found out that young ladies are excited about cryptocurrencies and the future.
We concluded our first girl coding camp for free at the Global Blockchain Women Alliance during the last summer holiday and it was a success as we had participants between the age of 8-16 express their excitement, and also saw girls aged 8 and 9 present the websites they developed on their own. We are already preparing these young girls for the future of technology.
By the time these young girls are ready to get jobs as developers, they would have turned into experts through Ekolance.
The future of blockchain and girls, how do you see these two merge?
At the Global Blockchain Women Alliance we envision a world where girls feel confident to tackle problems using Blockchain at any level, this is the world we are working to create.
If they are confident to take up any carrier in the blockchain space, nothing will stop them or slow them down.
They don’t see themselves as inferior because they’re girls, nor do they see themselves as lacking in ability.
This is the future that we envision for them and we are working towards it.
I choose to see a future where we have more girls, and more women working in the sector, developing world-transforming solutions.
Bottomline
Ekolance is starting a program for content creators. Now content is everything in the web3 and blockchain space because the content that is out there is what controls the actions and inactions of investors, traders and everyone else in the sector.
As a content creator, how you represent your brand and the way you project it, would ultimately impact the success of your brand, product or community.
So we started a 6-week training program for content creators on the 22nd of September and it is completely free.
Participants in our training program will get to meet experts and prospective employers, and do assignments and that is how they begin to build their experience in the blockchain space.
Featured Image: Modupe Ativie, Co-founder, Ekolance
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