It Needs a Seat at the Table (Op-ed)

Crypto adoption is accelerating around the world. And with it, a wave of well-funded projects keeps promising financial inclusion in Africa.

For years, they’ve pledged to serve the unbanked. But all too often, they deliver little more than press releases and abandoned Telegram groups. The users,  the very people these tools were meant for — are left behind.

The Illusion of Inclusion

Too many crypto ventures treat Africa as a monolith, a single user base waiting to be “onboarded.” They arrive with ready-made products, pre-written success metrics, and no real plan for the infrastructure gaps that define financial life for over a billion people.

After assessing the ground realities,  seeing both the promise and the pain of what happens when tech is exported to various regions without understanding the context,  I chose a different path. I’ve spent time, not weeks, but years,  listening, learning, and building with the people already working to solve complex problems in their communities.

I’ve also spent considerable time working with local leaders and developers in some of the continent’s major cities. I observed a recurring pattern: foreign teams land in Africa with pre-baked products and try to scale without understanding the region’s needs. That observation helped me understand a broader truth: many Western crypto firms drop in, conduct a few workshops, sign MOUs, and leave behind an underused app.

The Infrastructure Blind Spot

The problem isn’t intent — it’s execution. Too few crypto firms are willing to slow down and understand how deeply infrastructure shapes access. From smartphone penetration to unreliable electricity, high data costs, complex politics, and informal economies — the challenges are real. What’s missing isn’t capital. It’s humility and patience.

Africa is full of developers, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers who understand local financial systems better than anyone else. But instead of supporting them, the industry keeps recycling the same playbook: energy-intensive mining, pump-and-dump tokens, and carbon-offset greenwashing.

Take microtransactions. In parts of Africa like Chad and Niger — where liquidity is fragmented and traditional banking often fails — people don’t need speculative assets. They need simple, low-cost ways to move money. Yet how many blockchain projects are building for these real-world use cases? The number is near zero.

From Theory to Deployment

In regions where traditional financial infrastructure is fragmented and expensive, developers are building tools that work within real constraints, offline transactions, low-bandwidth environments, and local agent networks. These systems aren’t speculative, they’re pragmatic. The most effective models are those where local teams lead the design and implementation, while external partners support from the background, not from the top down.

Inclusion also means thinking differently about how value flows. In some regions, payment systems are being structured to route a portion of transaction fees back to the communities that maintain the underlying environmental or logistical infrastructure. Not as charity, but as built-in redistribution. These are not pilot programs, they’re blueprints for more just digital economies.

Sustainability is another area where crypto has failed Africa. In places where electricity is fragile or expensive, blockchain systems must be energy-efficient by design. There are blockchain consensus models now being tested that only reward participation powered by certified renewable energy, flipping the default from energy-intensive to regenerative. Sustainability can’t be bolted on as an afterthought. It has to be built in from the beginning.

If blockchain is going to work in Africa, it can’t behave like an extractive industry. It has to give back, economically, environmentally, and structurally. There is no future for this technology here unless it actively reduces harm.

What Africa Actually Needs

The uncomfortable truth is that Africa doesn’t need another wallet app, another remittance protocol designed for VC returns, or an on-chain savings account. It needs patient capital. It needs tools that are culturally embedded. And it needs collaboration with African talent from day one.

This means empowering developers and not forcing them to adopt someone else’s app. It also means helping to translate documentation into the local language and debugging in low-bandwidth environments.  It means recognizing that crypto isn’t something we bring to Africa, it’s already here.

Crypto doesn’t have to repeat Web2’s past mistakes. If we’re all serious about decentralization, we must stop talking about “bringing crypto to Africa” and start discussing how to learn from local talent and invest in the crypto already built there.

Africa doesn’t need saving. It needs respect, collaboration, and a seat at the table.

About the Author

Dr. Philip Blazdell is the CEO of FEDROK AG, a Swiss blockchain company focused on carbon credit tokenization and green infrastructure. With nearly three decades of experience in strategic business development, he has led innovation projects across emerging and developed markets, working at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and financial inclusion. A former visiting professor at UFC in Brazil, Dr. Blazdell holds a PhD in engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt. He has spent years working directly with developers and community leaders across Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific, bringing a grounded, systems-level perspective to technology deployment in complex environments.