How to Build a New Country
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‣
Episode
202
Guest & Project
Eche/Afropolitan
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Background Research
- Eche Emole - Cofounder of Afropolitan
- Afropolitan is creating a Digital Nation to enable all Africans to build abundant lives. The internet enables people to organize around shared values at scales that were previously unthinkable before the turn of the century. If it were a country, Facebook would be the largest one in the world. With the advent of cryptocurrency, the next Facebook will not be a social network with a passive online community, but rather a full-blown digital country with its own native currency and shared purpose.
- We are building the first-ever internet country
- Eche is also a former executive at Flutterwave Inc. a payment technology company focused on helping banks and businesses provide seamless and secure payment experiences for their customers in Africa and globally.
- Eche has 10 years of experience building communities across the Diaspora.
Questions:
- How did you get into the web3 space? You of course started off in a partially decentralised payment space with Flutterwave, what would you say was your first big moment? ✅
- How did you come to be a cofounder of Afropolitan?
- What exactly is Afropolitan - it feels a lot like a social membership club open to all africans across the globe, hence the alluded ‘cosmopolitan’ spirit, is this correct? What is an internet country? ✅
- Where are our birth countries in all this? What happens to them if in the long run we see ourselves as members of the Afropolitan nation vs the nations we physically reside in, how do we direct our resources into a direction of widespread positive impact? ✅
- Your manifesto quotes Frantz Fanon’s “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it”, has Africa betrayed it’s mission as an inter-national community? Do you think we still remember or ever had a mission to begin with? ✅
- Digital access is not as widespread across the continent as it is globally, how is Afropolitan addressing this? Particularly keeping crypto in mind? ✅
- With 10 years of experience in building communities, what have been the biggest lessons about the African communities in web3, particularly the ones you are trying to reach? ✅
- Disapora vs the Continent ✅
- Web3 will not (at least for the next while) exist without web2, what will it take for institutions to get on board with the new frontier, with the potential of blockchain technology ✅
- Does Afropolitan vet who joins the community? What if you have members who join with the intention of siphoning information - security ✅
- 3 words that describe how you feel about the space right now.
Intro
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