• The Cardano Foundation has made a donation to the project “Trust”, for an illustrated novel to raise awareness of the power of the Blockchain for the African continent.
• The illustrated novel is scheduled to be published in 2021.

As announced yesterday, the Cardano Foundation has made a donation of an unknown amount to ADA for the illustrated novel “Trust”, a pan-African project to raise awareness of the possibilities of blockchain technology. The project aims to provide financial sovereignty to underserved communities by educating young people in Africa about the power of the blockchain for financial independence.

To achieve this, the illustrated novel “Trust” will be published in 2021, written and illustrated by Kenyan novelist and illustrator Chief Nyamweya and Canadian tech entrepreneur and blockchain educator Anne Connelly. As the announcement states, Chief Nyamweya, a respected writer and illustrator, wrote the socially significant novel “Art of Unlearning” in 2018, curated “Ink and Pixels – A history of graphic art in Kenya” in 2015, and “is now dedicated to evangelizing blockchain across the African continent”.

Anne Connelly has worked with Doctors Without Borders Canada in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and now sits on their board. The novel will tell the story of a young Kenyan woman named Moraa who uses the blockchain to transform her community, fictional Wahengaland.

The main character will use the blockchain to overcome problems related to money, land titles and corruption, which are of great importance in many developing countries and could be alleviated by the introduction of the blockchain.

Trust will be published in both print and a first digital version for mobile phones. The digital version in particular is expected to have a wide reach, as the World Bank and the African Development Bank say there are over 650 million mobile phone users on the African continent, many of whom are aged between 15 and 24.

Within the announcement, Nyamweya explained how important it is to use art to spread awareness of blockchain:

By using storytelling to educate readers about blockchain technology, we hope to inspire millions of African youth to imagine alternative futures. Trust also empowers African youth to create these futures, by providing them with the training and tools to implement blockchain. Trust graphic novel will direct readers to online blogs and other learning resources, helping African youth become the next generation of crypto users, entrepreneurs, and developers.

Nathan Kaiser, Chairman of the Cardano Foundation, pointed out that blockchain technology will have the greatest impact in countries where the traditional financial infrastructure is dramatically undersupplied. Therefore, according to Kaiser, it is in these countries that potentially the most rapid change can be brought about in the way values are processed and distributed. Kaiser stated on this point:

Education is key to the adoption and proliferation of blockchain technology, and engaging visual arts like the Trust graphic novel are powerful tools for reaching a large and diverse audience. The Cardano Foundation’s interest in the African continent extends far beyond commercial applications for the Cardano protocol. We are genuinely invested in driving true socioeconomic transformation in underserved communities, and our donations to projects like Trust are just a small part of our wider investment in the continent of Africa itself.

The following motion comic was already published as the first teaser for “Trust”.

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