Dada means sister

In mid-2022, an events planner in Nairobi was asked to organize a Bitcoin meet-up. She did not know much about Bitcoin. She showed up to the room she had booked and noticed something she had spent her career noticing about rooms. There were almost no women in it.

Her name is Lorraine Marcel. The room she walked into would change the trajectory of her life and, gradually, the trajectory of Bitcoin literacy on the African continent.

What Lorraine saw that day was a pattern any African woman in any technical field will recognize instantly. The information was in the room. The men had it. The women, by absence or by silence, did not. Most “solutions” to this gap involve telling women to come into the men’s room and prove they belong. Lorraine drew a different conclusion. If Bitcoin were a tool for African financial sovereignty, then half the continent was being locked out of the tool. The fix was not to send a few women into existing spaces. The fix was to build a different room.

Lorraine Marcel.

She called it Bitcoin Dada. Dada means “sister” in Swahili. The choice of word was the design philosophy. This was not going to be a course. It was going to be a sisterhood that happened to teach bitcoin. By 2024, the program had reached 168 women per cohort. By March 2026 it had trained more than 1,300 African women across thirteen countries, with 300 new graduates in 2025 alone. The Human Rights Foundation funded it. Forbes wrote it up. CoinDesk profiled the founder. In 2024, the African Bitcoin Community named Lorraine the Most Impactful African Bitcoiner of the year.

The format is simple. Six weeks. Live, interactive virtual classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Beginner-friendly, jargon-stripped, taught in conversational English with occasional slips into Swahili and Pidgin and the warmth of women who already know each other’s children’s names by week three. Tuition-free, because Lorraine refuses to gate the curriculum behind money the women may not have. The women come from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Zambia, Cameroon, and beyond. Many have never opened a bank account. Many do not need to. They graduate, in Lorraine’s own description, having built a different relationship with money, not just a different wallet.

What she discovered while teaching is the part that Utu/Ubuntu practitioners should sit with carefully. The first lesson, she has said, is seldom about bitcoin. It is about the scarcity mindset most African women carry, embedded by generations of being told that money is a man’s domain, that they cannot ask, that they should be grateful for whatever crumbs land in their household budget, that financial conversations are inappropriate for them. Before you can teach a woman how to receive bitcoin, you sometimes have to teach her that she is allowed to receive money in her own name in the first place. The technical lesson is the easy part. The unlearning is the hard work.

Bitcoin Dada has now extended into Dada Devs, a parallel program that has trained over 150 African women software engineers in Bitcoin and Lightning Network development, many of whom now work in global Web3 companies. In March 2026, Lorraine launched Dada Hub, billed as the continent’s first women-led innovation hub for female builders. The trajectory is clear. From education, to development, to infrastructure. From students, to coders, to architects.

 Most of the bitcoin discourse that arrives on this continent is shaped by men, in English, by people whose economic experience does not resemble the average African woman’s

The deeper point is that she is correcting an architectural error in how Bitcoin has been carried into Africa. Most of the bitcoin discourse that arrives on this continent is shaped by men, in English, by people whose economic experience does not resemble the average African woman’s. That is not Bitcoin’s fault. That is the fault of they who got to the microphone first. Lorraine, in effect, took the microphone, walked into a different room, and began transmitting the same protocol in a different vernacular. Same network. Same monetary properties. Different architecture of belonging.

This matters because the African liberation tradition has always understood that who teaches shapes what is learned. Cabral wrote about this. Nyerere wrote about this. If Bitcoin is going to be a tool for African financial sovereignty rather than a foreign import that further marginalizes those already on the margin, the educators have to look like the continent. They have to teach in our languages and our textures and at hours that work for women who have just put their children to bed.

Bitcoin Dada is one of the clearest applications of the Utu/Ubuntu principle to financial technology happening anywhere in Africa today. It says: I am because we are, and that “we” includes the sister who never got into the room.

Follow This Is Africa on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.