16/11/2024 –, Mises Stage
Could a small country in Africa be the next bitcoin country? Like El Salvador, Malawi is a small, densely populated and mostly unheard of agricultural nation. It is also one of the world’s poorest nations and, with an election next year, is in desperate need of ‘New Ideas’. Bitcoin Boma was founded to educate on and advocate for bitcoin in a country where the currency can be devalued by 44% overnight, savings interest rates are capped at 4% and dollars are scarce and highly regulated.
I have lived there for the past ten years and founded a business to help companies succeed in this challenging environment. In this talk, I will share my experiences of this beautiful and peaceful country and my realisation that the donors who pump in billions of funding miss the underlying cause of the poverty trap - fiat money. Through Bitcoin Boma our aim is for bitcoin to fix this and for Malawi to be an example to the rest of Africa as El Salvador is to Latin America.
Malawi is a small, densely populated and mostly unheard of agricultural nation. Sounds familiar? There are no volcanoes, but a third of the country is a lake and 95% of its power comes from hydro. There’s also a small bitcoin mining operation thanks to Gridless that lights up a remote village in a country where only 15% of people have electricity.
When I moved to Malawi in 2014 the local Kwacha currency was about 450 to the dollar and is now closing in on 2,500. Last November the central bank devalued by 44% overnight. Meanwhile it caps interest rates on savings at 4% but says inflation is 40%. Unsurprisingly, nobody saves in money and dollars are scarce and highly regulated.
So even the staple food maize becomes monetised, a better store of value than the Kwacha. In town, people store value in land, bricks and mortar, pushing prices ever higher. In rural areas, livestock is preferred, with goats outnumbering adults. But this ‘store of value’ eats everything and so new trees never grow to replace those felled for making bricks and charcoal. This leaves poor soils and no defence against storms, a disaster in a country where 85% of people depend on agriculture for survival.
It's an endless cycle of poverty with fiat money being the root of it all. In search of an answer, donors have dumped billions of dollars on the country with questionable results, but it may be that an anonymous coder provides the real solution.
I co-founded Bitcoin Boma with Grant Gombwa and Nick Twyman as a means of stirring up grassroots bitcoin adoption and influencing policy towards sound money. We’ve held meetups, hosted Trezor Academy, talked with officials and presented to the state electricity company on mining. It’s a long road but next year is an election year and anything could happen
EconoKidz was created by Ian Foster and narrated by two of his sons, Theodore (10) and Max (8), collectively known as The TedMax. When the banks were bailed out in 2008 followed by endless money printing and interest rate manipulation ever since, Ian realised that even those in his own profession – an accountant with a degree in economics – were blind to the problem. So he set about creating EconoKidz to help children around the world have sufficient understanding of economics and money to avoid falling into the fiat and CBDC trap.
For the past ten years, Ian has lived in Malawi, Southern Africa, where he founded a company to help startups and small businesses strengthen their financial management and raise capital. He has been an advocate for bitcoin adoption in the country since 2014 and continues to support grassroots adoption and education through @BitcoinBoma.