Dash Hub Africa and Dash Africa have been spearheading Dash adoption in Africa despite inconsistent funding for their projects.

Ghana and Nigeria continue to top the charts of countries that use Dash to purchase mobile airtime through Bitrefill, according to stats shared with Dash Force News by both organizations. Dash Hub Africa has been pursuing merchant and consumer adoption via their ambassador program. When they visited the Ivory Coast, their ambassadors were able to get 25 merchants to accept Dash and listed on DiscoverDash.com. Dash Hub Africa told Dash Force News that “consumers are willing to spend Dash on basic utilities like bills, airtime, subscription and vouchers”, which makes the “5 of the 8 countries from Dash Hub Africa be ranked on Bitrefill metrics as some of the highest in the world (Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Togo)”. Dash Hub Africa also discussed the overall advantages they see for Africans to adopt Dash.

“Dash offers the best comparable to any readily available payment service in Africa. So therefore, I encourage Africans to take [a] good look at the opportunity Dash offers to their businesses and solve all payments with Dash as priority.”

Also recently, Dash Africa has been working on Dash integrations with other exchanges and organization, but said that they had to put the integrations on hold due to a lack of funding. They published a rough timeline and budget for completion of their project integrations on Dash Forum. In the same post, Dash Africa mentioned how they have accomplished “4,000 Dash wallet downloads”, “[i]n depth Dash education of 250+ persons in [their] dashafrica.org ambassador program, and hosted “[n]umerous meetups, conference attendances and other educational activities”. Dash Africa also just announced that they will be rebranding as Dash Nigeria to avoid confusion with other Dash projects throughout Africa.

Pursing Dash adoption amidst adversity

Both organizations have suffered from inconsistent funding from the DAO Treasury over the past few months as the Treasury became stressed from low fiat exchange rate pressure. Dash Hub Africa then sought smaller funding amounts through DashBoost, but unfortunately still failed to receive funds. Nevertheless, their last proposal to spread Dash to three West African French-speaking countries, Togo, Benin Republic, and Ivory Coast has been funded by the DAO Treasury.

As a temporary solution, Dash Hub Africa has “plans to introduce varieties of products such as android devices, pen drives, accessories and gadgets” to generate revenue in an attempt to make their operations self sustaining. Dash Hub Africa told DFN that these funds help, but they only “break-even with little profit to pay staff and settle operational expenses”.

Dash Nigeria, formerly Dash Africa, told DFN that they have successfully completed integrations with the following exchanges; WegoEx, Satowallet.com, Truexgold.com, Gredoe-currency.com. However, they have been unable to complete their 15 other integrations in the pipeline and plan to submit another DAO Treasury proposal for the next cycle. They told DFN that “work is ongoing”, but “to complete the ‘paused integrations’ more hands are needed”.

Dash’s network allows competitive growth

Dash has thrived on being able to fund its own development and adoption strategies, which has allowed local knowledge to maximize adoption while also mitigating perverse incentives that arise from third party funding. This has been seen in areas like Venezuela that have been able to significantly grow adoption via community outreach groups and development teams funded through the DAO Treasury, DashBoost, and crowdfunding. The multitude of methods to fund organizations within Dash displays Dash’s ability to adapt to changing scenarios and environments to ensure that Dash is still able to achieve wider adoption.

The tighter funding has arisen from the Dash-to-fiat exchange price decreasing significantly from its highs almost a year ago, which has cause many formerly funded proposals to either reduce or cease operations. However, the silver lining is that this created more intense competition, which has caused projects to become more efficient in spending money. Then as DashBoost and DashDonates emerged, along with Mega Dash Raffle and Dash Ventures on the horizon, Dash has been able to find a multitude of ways to ensure consumers discover the advantages Dash offers through financial and monetary independence.