The Built With Bitcoin
BTC
Yusuf Nessary with pupils at the BWB Nursery and Primary School, Machakos, Kenya.
The school was built in collaboration with Paxful and Zamzam, a humanitarian organization dedicated to eradicating poverty by providing clean, sustainable water and access to quality education to villages around the world.
The school is a hybrid of a nursery and a primary school, with six classrooms, a teachers’ lounge, and a technology center. It has electricity and a sustainable well that supplies clean water to the students and the community. It is also internet-connected.
According to Ray Yussef, CEO of Paxful and Executive Director of the Built With Bitcoin Foundation, “Built With Bitcoin is a testament to the power of cryptocurrency.” We firmly believe that it can improve lives and make the world a better place. “
The Built With Bitcoin foundation donated learning materials from Shamory, a family company that develops Bitcoin books, card games, and other learning materials for use by kids to help them understand bitcoin in a fun way, to ensure the students learn about Bitcoin early on.
According to Yusuf Nessary, Co-Founder and Director of Philanthropy at the Built With Bitcoin foundation, for them, it’s not just about school systems, water wells, and solar systems, it’s also about financial literacy and education for isolated communities since it’s extremely important for their journey to financial freedom.
Though the school is still reliant on donors and well-wishers for its continued operations, it is intended to become self-sustaining in the future, once all upper-primary classes and facilities are completed, according to Guantai Kathurima, CEO of Bitcoin Mtaani, who has actively championed Bitcoin content translation into African languages.
While the world-wide web is littered with negative headlines about Bitcoin, such as Silk Road, bitcoin scams, leveraged Bitcoin trader liquidations, exchanges going bankrupt, multi-million dollar exchange hacks, and bear market FUD, the reality is quite different. The Built With Bitcoin foundation is making a global footprint of Bitcoin as a force of good.
While traditional foundations face high overhead costs and inefficiencies in the way they manage donor funds, Built With Bitcoin has a simple structure that ensures 92% of donations go directly to projects. 8% is spent on administrative costs such as accounting, website management, and The Giving Block fees. All other associated costs, such as staff salaries and travel expenses, are covered by a separate grant fund.
In July, the Built With Bitcoin foundation also built a water well in Igbaruku Community, Kogi State, Nigeria, Africa, which serves approximately 1,000 people. This saves the community time that would otherwise be spent fetching water from a distance and ensures that the community has access to clean water. During the project, members of the community were taught about Bitcoin in their native language.
To date, the Foundation has constructed or repaired ten schools (eight in Africa), seven solar projects, and more than a dozen water and farming systems around the world. According to Yusuf, in an interview with Mumo, a crypto vlogger, the Built With Bitcoin foundation’s success is measured not only by the level and number of infrastructure that they build, but also by their ability to connect and build trusted human relationships.
“Bitcoin without the people is just code.” –Matt Odell
