[RECAP] NEAR-MEET in Kisumu: Meeting a community of women web developers

Kisumu is not only the largest and most important city in Western Kenya but it is the gateway to Lake Victoria, the largest lake on the continent. (Fun fact: Lake Victoria is one of the few lakes on the planet where you can watch the sunset over the water as you would over an ocean.)

As part of our ongoing Kenya crypto tour, we participated in the Lake Basin Innovation & Investment Week, an event partially hosted at the LakeHub venue where we spent our time. This part of the event saw LakeHub host a community of creatives, programmers, hackers, and designers with a focus on girls from underprivileged backgrounds.

LakeHub and Sankore have partnered to use the facility to deliver NEAR-certified dev training to the students. This is an exciting moment for both the NEAR community and the children (and their parents) in the Kisumu region who will train as developers to code on NEAR and access the NEAR ecosystem.
Sankore’s partnership with LakeHub is a step towards establishing a physical city node in Kisumu and later outreach efforts to activate wallets among the general population and businesses in particular.

Our tour’s next destination is Nakuru, capital of Nakuru County in Northwest Kenya. Like Kisumu, it is situated in Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Nakuru hosts five universities and possesses one of Kenya’s highest concentrations of students. As at the tour’s previous city stops, Sankore will use its speaking slot at the event and run side-events on-campus to engage with students and businesses alike. Our goal through all this continues to be the expansion of the NEAR ecosystem and community.

Stay tuned for more. The Future is NEAR in Africa!

Thanks Team!

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What an awesome partnership and yet another fantastic stop on the Kenya Crypto Tour!

Approximately how many students access the LakeHub facility on a regular basis? What sort of businesses in Kisumu are of interest to reach through this partnership?

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Thank you @mecsbecs ! Fifty students access the LukeHub facility regularly. The opportunity for us in Kisumu’s will revolve around the Import/export merchandise and goods from Lake Victoria accessing three countries, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda. Equally lots of manufacturing opportunities, supply chain, agriculture value chain and county governments.

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