Myself and others in the diaspora have formed a community.
We each chip in £5 a month to fund projects back home.
We vote on how the money is spent.
We’ve deployed £104,832 into projects so far.
Interested in joining?
Over the last two months, I've been building a non-profit company for the black community.
It's ready to see the world, and I'm excited about the journey ahead. Introducing ...
Please share :)
So ... I just relocated to Lagos 🇳🇬.
Who should I reach out to? Try and meet up with? ... I want to get deep into the tech & startup ecosystem.
Any suggestions welcome.
😔❤️ This month, we made the difficult decision to close Kwanda down and cease operations.
🪶 We've published a closing letter from our founder detailing why.
"Black people don't support each other".
I can't agree. We have 100 - 150 joining
@JoinKwanda
every month to support people they may never meet.
Putting up £5 a month in a cost of living crisis.
🇳🇬 Nigerian Diasporans happily investing in 🇬🇭 Ghanaian school kids.
🇯🇲 Jamaican
More funny company building stories.
Last month 2 global brands got in contact asking if donations to Kwanda are anonymous. I thought “These donations are going to be huge”. I said “Yes”.
They dropped about £75 between the two of them.
Hey everyone! 👋🏾
We're back and excited to introduce
@joinmoyo
- Where givers can come together to provide a reliable monthly income to people living below the poverty line.
It took 31 years to find work that I’m in love with.
I get it now.
Something changed last week, and I’m still in that glow.
I realised
@JoinKwanda
had fallen perfectly in line with who I am and how I want to work.
Seeing black women on twitter with “tech entrepreneur”, “obsessed with tech”, “tech newbie”, “software”, “UI/UX” in their bios is exciting.
Most times I’ve encountered black women in tech, esp on the entrepreneur side, they’ve been really, really good at it.
Black people: If you’re consistently tired. Get your Vitamin D, testosterone and thyroid levels tested and corrected.
Take a vitamin D3 supplement (8000 UI) correctly: With a fatty meal, and alongside Vitamin K2, A & Zinc.
You’re still in control of your day, week, year or life if you still have the ability to:
- Say No
- Ask specific, unusual, and interesting questions
- Challenge your perspective
- Follow a plan
Most people won’t ‘get back to you’. Most people won’t finish that course. Most people won’t do anything with their ideas.
There is very little competition for those who do what they say they will do.
Use that.
I’m excited about the shift to remote working.
More opportunity for Africans to participate in global development.
Clears the runway for the diaspora to return home and build their lives, careers and families in more abundant and interesting terrain.
High ROI things I did last year:
- Therapy
- Non negotiable 8-hour sleep habit
- Paid course on stock trading
- Fixed Vit D, Testosterone and Typhoid levels
- Joined
@thread
- Travelled to Ghana
- Weekly infrared sauna therapy
D&I is paying people to sit in an uncomfortable chair and asking them to be grateful for the opportunity. D&I thinks more people in those chairs will make everything better. The problem is the chair. It’s not comfortable.
Looking for a CTO (unpaid at first) to
@JoinKwanda
and lead engineering, own core product, develop style-guide, testing, etc.
We’re using Vue, Firebase and Cloud functions. Let’s work together. Lots to do.
A lot of your favourite Black representatives are terrified of being attached to “Black only” versus “BAME”, and large corporations are their sole income providers so their activism is capped. More tea soon.
🎉 Saturday was amazing.
🤯 300+ in attendance. Shallat security for doing the right thing and letting more people in beyond capacity.
Here's the only video I managed to capture as people began streaming in.
It was so good to see all the amazing villagers and friends of
We need many individual, narrow and small philanthropists rather than large charities. So many of us miss the opportunity to save and transform lives around the world.
🖐️🏿 Product/website designers I get a few work requests into my inbox that I haven't got the capacity to handle.
If you're looking for freelance work in the coming months and beyond that let me know, and I'll work out a way to pass on jobs.
Got a lil emotional receiving these pics from Kenya 🇰🇪.
Because of
@JoinKwanda
members, this community just harvested their first batch of sustainable crops.
Man, I'm so proud of us.
Let's do more 🚀
Any founders have mental models / frameworks for eliminating, or getting close to eliminating all inconsequential meetings, introductions, requests, etc?
I'm wasting a lot of time managing noise.
Don’t complain about the status quo. Build something that challenges that status quo. Against all odds.
Even if it doesn’t work it will fill you with purpose, and that’s a good way to move through life - with purpose.
Looking for a generalist Freelance Writer to join the team
@JoinKwanda
ad-hoc / long-term.
If you're comfortable writing sales copy, press releases, blog articles, email correspondence, editing, quick updates etc ... let's work together.
🇸🇱 Meet Kadiatu, one of the entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone who got a loan backed by Kwanda.
🤝🏿 Recently, she initiated her second loan period to help her new business venture: hand-crafted soap production locally known as "Africana Soap".
Learn more:
I think black history and black present has forced a lot of black people to deeply lean into the human skill of creativity, which is becoming an increasingly prized skill as automation washes over the world.
Black people are able to easily manage multiple personalities and voices from the age of 5, switching and adapting at a whim, but we couldn't call ourselves professional actors.
It's easy to find strategists. Infinitely harder to find people that can get their hands dirty and execute a strategy.
Generally I'm avoiding working with people who put forward strategies they couldn't execute themselves.
Outsized returns from hiring Black women and investing in Black women founders. Why aren’t we doing it at a rate that matches the return? ... or even a fraction of it.
@SemudaraAbayomi
Hi Bayomi,
It's not my job to conform to the way that you do things. You want to do business with Americans, you have to do things the way WE do things, not complain that we're being biased.
You can say the same thing about me, which is true. But I don't care about doing any
For those wondering.
I don’t take a salary at Kwanda, and I don’t intend to.
I run a product agency where we build products and internal automation for Series A and B startups and sometimes public companies.
That’s my income source.
I also think black people know this, and show it off in the way we move and talk. We're calling it sauce but I think it's just the result of being forced to live a highly creative life.
So much of the foundation Africans and Caribbean’s in the UK are building on today was laid by Caribbeans. I can never do the diaspora war thing, except for pronouncing plantain with the “ain”.
For example, in Nigeria there are so many people in prison for non-crimes where they’ll be released upon paying a £20 fine.
You can make it your personal mission to get 5 people a month out. No website, no company, no fanfare. Just a simple mission.
If you learn something you can teach something. Education alongside technology must be one of the most leveraged approaches to tacking this centuries challenges.
It feels like we’re being called upon to take on the next wave of complex global challenges, right as we find ourselves in an age of entertainment and attention deficit.
Very proud of the work we're doing to support girls with reusable menstrual kits.
I had zero notions of menstruation being seen as taboo in places.
I feel a little naive now, but it was a very normal part of life in my household.
I wouldn't have paid much attention to period
I'm sure many of us have had the experience of looking inside a stark freezer, complaining there's nothing to eat, only for our African & Caribbean parents to look in the same freezer and put together 5 different meals that are amazing.
You’re not bad at public speaking. You haven’t done the rounds.
You’re not bad at drawing. You haven’t done the rounds.
You’re not bad at building businesses. You haven’t done the rounds.
It will be important for black people to recognise 'creativity' as an undercurrent of all human activity and not just an industry. This means the creativity we use in the kitchen is the same creativity we will use to solve food distribution problems.
🚀 Milestone hit: 900 villagers at
@JoinKwanda
as of today.
The first 1000 villagers will be marked and outlined in our records.
If this were 2009, I would tell you to buy Bitcoin.
In 2024, I'm telling you to make that cohort of Kwanda's first 1000.
In a few years, you'll
There will come a time where it's too expensive for advertisers to not go directly to the sauce for content and virality. When that time comes, make sure you are independent and own your creativity.
People telling me I should be focusing on venture capital in Africa, not philanthropy.
I’d like to remind you
@OpenAI
was created with philanthropic capital.
Tech startups are good, We want to fund African research labs, science, innovation.
This is how well
@JoinKwanda
has grown since January.
We're at a 30% monthly growth rate!
100+ people have joined this month, and we're 12 days in.
Individuals coming together to build out a dignified source of funding for ourselves.
I'm excited to watch us all become leaders
When Black community leaders break trust (around money), it’s not just an unfortunate greedy moment.
It wipes out millions in future value and assets that could have only been captured by groups. Which are impossible to build with eroded trust.
It's such a wicked thing to do.
We certainly came back stronger the second time around.
The support for Kwanda is very much appreciated. We don't have any backers, just the individuals who decide to join the community and support the work we do. That feels good!
A beautiful month for Kwanda 💛
🚀 We hit our first traction goal of 1000 villagers
🪩 300+ villagers and friends attended our London event
🫰🏿 We grew our monthly income from £6,500 to £8,900
🇿🇼 We launched a project in Zimbabwe!
I’m currently very interested in or actively pursuing: Independent community settlements in Africa (or charter cities), Blockchain applications, Decentralisation / unbundling citizens from bad governments.
Where it started ... 💛 Where it is now
The first attempt at building a vertical garden and how it looks today. 🙏🏿
We’ve funded 20 vertical gardens so far, and they’ll feed 150 people sustainably.
Students without access to sustainable menstrual products miss 3-5 school days per month. This means up to 65 days per year, or nearly 20% of the school year, is lost to a lack of access to necessary products.
🤯 It costs us £5 to reclaim 500 hours of additional school time per
Mandem, If you’re feeling lethargic, check that you’re not going too far out against your own nature. Code-switching, pandering, lying, all those things.
Owning our creativity means owning our history, the good and bad parts, but that's all useless if we don't own our future. So as a culture we need to pull up to every table and lean on our creativity. Creative thinkers can never be imposters.
In this new age, we're coming into we'll have to be able to sharply identify the value of our creativity and price tag it because it's going to be the most sought after resource in a world of robots.
In a time like this I’m grateful for the large amounts of time I’ve invested in to reading Stoic philosophy.
My most read and most recommended:
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The shortness of life by Seneca
Sometimes you forget you're living out your prayers because things are not always glamorous.
Not always glamorous but, certainly, always beautiful.
Note to self.