In Focus: Beam Africa, The Mission, The Team and the Buzzing Community

The past nine months have been epic! It has seen the creation and expansion of the Beam sub-community in Africa through an organic and gradual process, the ideal Beam growth model. We have grown from having just one ambassador in Port Harcourt Nigeria to a network consisting of 6 ambassadors across cities in Africa.

Operating as a small innovative startup team. Steadily churning out and implementing ideas on the best ways to promote Beam on various mediums in the continent. The goal is simple, get the community educated on financial privacy and blockchain tech, and to get the Beam mobile and desktop wallet on as many African owned devices as possible.

So far, we have achieved this by an array of different activities, such as hosting meet-ups, attending and speaking at meet-ups organized by other projects (3rd party events). Creating educational content to promote cryptocurrency and Beam adoption, building a community around Beam in Africa. We were doing fine, then Covid-19 pandemic shook the world to its core, but we didn’t let it stop us.

We joined the rest of the world and moved all our activities online. We had more AMAs, virtual competitions to engage the community, and more fun stuff to stay upbeat in these trying times. These online activities have seen the Beam Africa community grow stronger with each passing day, and the Beam African team has created arguably one of the most active crypto communities in Africa.

Beam, which launched in January 2019 as a privacy cryptocurrency, is an implementation of the elegant Mimblewimble protocol. Since the Hard Fork, the network has upgraded to include features such as Confidential Assets, and Lelantus-MW, that see the project leading the charge towards a confidential DeFi ecosystem. Certainly, Beam is a fascinating project, one that has privacy by default, and now offers Confidential Assets that allow independent tokens to be issued on the Beam blockchain. These tokens will by default benefit from Beam’s inherent confidentiality, and scalability.

Mission Update

The ultimate goal for the Beam Africa team is for the mass adoption of Beam across the continent. It’s up to the team to figure out the best way of achieving this. Which could take the form of setting smaller targets like partnering to host a 3rd-party event with a huge mass appeal, or organizing a hackathon in a university with an active crypto community participation.

In achieving our goals and objectives, sometimes certain opportunities present themselves, and it is important to be decisive and seize them will they exist. A good example is the recent trends of crypto projects jumping on TikTok in an effort to promote their brands. And we thought this will be a great opportunity to promote Beam to over 500 Millions users on the video-sharing social networking platform. We launched the #BeamTikTokChallenge to our community, and we received several entries within the duration of the challenge.

We regard the BeamTikTokChallenge to be a wild success, as Beam got great visibility on TikTok, and a great number of new users joined our community.

Covid-19 Shift

We are change benders and adopters, as we are accustomed to iterating, adjusting, and modifying our plans and strategies while promoting Beam. But the overarching goal always remains “Getting the Beam mobile and desktop wallet on as many African owned devices as possible”. Being big fans of organic growth, our activities on platforms like Telegram, Twitter, Uptrend, Substack, and Medium, all grew from the very first follow till where we are now.

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic meant we could not attend offline events, at least for the foreseeable future. We had to restructure our activities to be content-centric since the global lockdown saw more people at home spending more time on their devices.

So, the Beam Africa team saw this as an opportunity and we focused our efforts on creating more engaging content like articles, videos, graphics and more online interaction. Beam Africa made an entry into Uptrennd (a blockchain-based blogging platform) where we have a community of over 2.3k subscribers, thanks to the pandemic.

Achievements

Beam Africa was not the first Beam sub-community, but we were lucky enough to have found the spectacular array of ambassadors that have made Beam Africa one of the most active Telegram communities, not only within the Beam community but also among several crypto communities across Africa.

Every week, various content is released by the Beam Africa community. We’ve held AMA’s, both offline and online meetups, and created engaging videos of various formats with different kinds of relevant content for the pleasure of the community.

In the past few months, we launched the Beam Africa Monthly update on Substack, which is a monthly newsletter that highlights all the activities within the Beam Africa community. With this, community members can have a recap of all the activities that the Beam Africa team conducted during each month.

The Team

After the community decided to launch the Beam Africa sub-community, it was evident that there’ll be the need for talented young ambassadors to join the ranks in promoting Beam across the continent. This was a crucial task we needed to get right for the ultimate success of the project. The major requisite was that the ideal ambassador should possess the adequate soft skills needed to thrive in the tech space, and more importantly, passionate about cryptocurrencies.

Join the Beam Africa Ambassador Program here

So, myself and Angus Sullivan (Beam’s Community Lead) went about scheduling interview sessions with prospective candidates. Today, we’re proud of the team we’ve been able to assemble. Meet the team, and find out what they do to promote Beam, cryptocurrency, and privacy across Africa.

Agbona Igwemoh, Team Lead: Being one of the first ambassadors to join the Beam Ambassador Program, Agbona is an incredible privacy advocate and understands why it is important to our very being. A serial entrepreneur, Agbona helps in coordinating activities across the various regions in Africa where Beam has ambassadors. He is always on the lookout for collaborative opportunities and partnerships. He wears many hats, creating contents (like the periodic Why Privacy Matters), recruiting new ambassadors, managing the team’s performance, and ensuring the team stays motivated at all times.

Olusegun Adeniran, Tech Lead: With a solid background in tech and software development, Adeniran tries to understand all of Beams great tech features to educate Africans while creating content around these awesome features. He is responsible for creating an African inspired Confidential Asset on the Beam testnet called Eco, he’s leading Beam Africa Tech, where he tries to synergize with young Africans on how to share knowledge and implement Beam’s awesome technologies.

Wisdom Augustine, Ph & Content Lead: Also-known-As Groot is responsible for some of the most captivating content to have come out of Beam Africa. He is a brilliant writer and a budding UI/UX designer, who is responsible for most of the artworks and banners to have come out from Beam Africa.

Success Maduka, Lagos Ambassador: Scarlet who leads her PR firm known as Scarlet Media where she manages the needs of her clients. Susu Spending, as she is popularly known in the Beam Africa community, is the life of the party. She leads most of the interaction in the community, and she is responsible for some of the most successful community-driven initiatives. She is also a terrific content developer, she creates amazing video tutorials on how to better utilize the Beam mobile app, as well as making cool banners.

Obinna Nwakwor, Kenya Lead: Obinna simply gets things done. He is a business developer at heart responsible for many strides we’ve made in Kenya. He has hosted several meet-ups in his community, as well as being part of several 3rd party events where he has promoted Beam successfully. We can’t wait to see Obinna in action again once the pandemic subsides in Kenya.

Beam in Ghana

The Beam Africa team has set its sights on the budding crypto space of Ghana, with the hope of expanding our ambassador network within the region. We’ll be collaborating with a leading crypto influencer and educator Elisha Owusu Akyaw, popularly known as Gh Crypto Guy for an AMA session in the BlockxAfrica. Elisha is a key figure within the Ghana crypto space, and we’ll be working hand-in-hand in the best ways of promoting Beam in Ghana.

Are you a young, driven Ghanian who is passionate about cryptocurrency and ready to drive its adoption in your community? Then apply to be part of the Beam Africa Ambassador Program

Final Words

It will be difficult to successfully put into writing all our challenges and successes while promoting Beam in Africa. As it is a journey that comes with a lot of highs and lows, but one thing is for sure, team Beam Africa is here to stay. As we are working towards a decentralized Africa, one governed by us, the people. This can be only be achieved if we all work together.

For more information about Beam, do check out the links below:

Visit the website here, also check out the FAQ section here

Download the sleek wallet here

Join the African community on Telegram

Follow Beam Africa, and Beam on Twitter.

Attend the BlockXAfrica AMA with BEAM on July 31st by joining BlockXAfrica on Telegram.

The BlockNewsAfrica Community series highlights the work and efforts of cryptocurrency project and product communities on the continent.

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