The Decent Report

Oct 31, 2023

(TechNext24) - Blockchain funding across Africa increased by 1,668% between 2021 and 2022 Blockchain funding across Africa increased by 1,668% between 2021 and 2022.

The Cardano blockchain-backed entity, Emurgo Africa has released a comprehensive report detailing the state of Web3 and blockchain technology in the continent of Africa.

Amongst the many notable revelations in the report, it was disclosed that blockchain funding across Africa increased by 1,668% between 2021 and 2022, indicating that the adoption of blockchain technology by African countries is the fastest in the world.

The latest report from Emurgo Africa reiterates that many stakeholders believe that blockchain technology presents a plethora of opportunities for the African continent. The revolutionary technology has proven to possess the qualities of transparency and decentralization to solve challenges such as international remittance, financial inclusion, and land registration.

You can read the full article here

Oct 30, 2023

(Cointelegraph) - A small island nation in the Atlantic Ocean grapples with a cash economy influenced by tourism, remittances and limited resources. Can Bitcoin help?

Cointelegraph recently traveled to Cape Verde, West Africa, to explore whether Bitcoin could be a tool for progress.

Hall discovers that more Cape Verdeans live abroad than on the country’s islands. Due to its small land mass, it struggles to cultivate and export goods abroad. The islanders of Cape Verde, especially Sal, rely on tourism to stimulate the economy, and relatives living abroad send money home.

The combination of a tourism and remittance-based economy presents multiple issues. Due to the presence of tourists year-round, Sal uses three currencies: the local Escudo, the U.S. dollar, and the Euro, although Hall discovered it’s also possible to pay in British pounds. Mastercard and Visa charge upward of 4% for transaction fees in stores, which merchants often pass on to customers.

While investigating these economic issues, Hall met with Renato Evarchi, one of the first business owners in Cape Verde to accept Bitcoin. He shed light on the economic situation and explained how more and more Cape Verdeans were warming up to a borderless, immutable and decentralized internet currency.

You can read the full article here

Nov 17, 2023

South Africa is the only African country to announce interest to pass the new standard into domestic law.

(TechNext24) - South Africa has joined a list of 47 other countries that have committed to adopting a taxation standard enabling them to go after individuals and businesses that fail to report earnings and pay taxes on crypto, NFT and other digital assets by 2027. 

According to a statement last Friday, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) welcomed the standard developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This new standard allows the automatic exchange of information related to the ‘crypto-asset’ tax. It falls under the OECD’s mandate by the G20 to develop a global framework for easy and automated exchange of tax-relevant information to curb tax evasion.

Last week, the 48 countries adopting the standard set a 2027 deadline to implement it in their laws. The 48 countries and jurisdictions, which include the United Kingdom, the United States, Mexico, Germany, France, Canada, Brazil, and Singapore, pledged to “swiftly transpose” to the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) standard by 2027.

You can read the full article here

Nov 17, 2023

Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were “mixed and hilarious,” says Abbott, a computer scientist and researcher. 

Then she typed in a few sentences in isiZulu and asked the chatbot to translate them into English. Once again, the answers? Not even close. Although there have been efforts to include certain languages in AI models even when there is not much data available for training, to Abbott, these results show that the technology “really still isn’t capturing our languages.”  

Abbott’s experience mirrors the situation faced by Africans who don’t speak English. Many language models like ChatGPT do not perform well for languages with smaller numbers of speakers, especially African ones. But a new venture called Lelapa AI, a collaboration between Abbott and a biomedical engineer named Pelonomi Moiloa, is trying to use machine learning to create tools that specifically work for Africans.

Vulavula, a new AI tool that Lelapa released today, converts voice to text and detects names of people and places in written text (which could be useful for summarizing a document or searching for someone online). It can currently identify four languages spoken in South Africa—isiZulu, Afrikaans, Sesotho, and English—and the team is working to include other languages from across Africa.

You can read the full article here

Nov 17, 2023

(CNBC Africa) - Another edition of CNBC Africa's all-new AI dedicated segment that keeps its finger on the pulse of continent-wide news that matters. Every week, they dive into the latest headlines and speak to market innovators about all thing's tech-driven across Africa. This week they speak to Rhys Morgan, VP and General Manager, EMEA, Media and Networks at Intelsat on some of their latest innovations in providing digital access to Africa.

You can read the full article here

Share The Decent Report

This newsletter is community run and curated by Built Different

• Check out Mariblock in our opinion on of the best places to get your African blockchain news.

• Keep up to date with all the latest African Tech by subscribing to TechSafari our favorite African tech newsletter

• Build Better With Affordable Freelancers from Afriblocks