He speaks with conviction. A tone of assurance, and then sits with the posture of optimism that Africa needs to leapfrog its hurdles. John Kamara is putting his trust on blockchain as the continent thirsts the most for the technology to help build its foundation of finance and healthcare.

As a slew of entrepreneurs and developers emerge from Africa’s economic powerhouses like Nigeria and Kenya, there is an urgent need for visionary accelerators to lead this pan-African ambition. Kamara is on the frontline mission of achieving this.

He wears many hats – running an AI research institute and an incubator studio for blockchain-focused startups, and managing e-commerce and healthcare startups. Kamara is the chairman of Power Learn Project PLP Africa, which he leads in driving education for software engineers in the continent and providing the opportunity via the blockchain to store the identity and verify credentials in Africa under the Cardano blockchain network.

Born in Africa, Kamara started learning how to create solutions for the challenges he faced from a young age. Being an intelligent boy, he trained himself how to code as he worked in different roles to grow his skills over the years.

An Insatiable Desire to Learn

(John Kamara speaking in an interview with NODO News in Nairobi / Photo by NODO News)

His ultimate goal was to always gain knowledge and constantly improve his understanding of the world. “I wanted to learn something new that I previously did not know, regardless of whether it was irrelevant,” he tells Nodo News. “I believed that at some point in the future, whatever I learnt would come in handy.”

His first job involved working for a company in Ireland in the late 1990s. He then joined Yahoo and later Google in 2002. He worked at Talent Consulting in 2005, BMC Software and Full Tilt in 2008, 888 Holdings between 2010 and 2013, before joining Global Gaming Africa where he worked till 2018. He also worked for Cortex from 2017 as Africa CEO.

During his stay in Ireland, Kamara founded an airline, and was happy having flown the first passenger from Ireland to Nigeria. He even went into entertainment and launched the African Film Festival, the first of its kind in Ireland during his spare time.

All this time, he says, he wasn’t focused on making money but rather traveling and discovering the world, experiencing the different cultures and at the same time improving himself through the jobs he got along the way.

Only a Few People Believed in Blockchain in 2010

His first experience of blockchain and Web3 came just a few years after Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin in 2008. In 2010, he had a stint in the gaming industry, where he realized that bitcoin was an accepted mode of payment. However, only a few people knew or accepted it for payments.

After joining AAA Sports in London, he worked there for a while before starting his first ever startup – Spade Social. It was a platform that did image reading for video content, and processing targeted advertising for the gaming industry.

He built what he says was the largest keyword engine at the time. It mapped over a million keywords to map content for the gaming industry. Users preferred Kamara’s startup to YouTube. He then built a second startup and got involved in blockchain and AI.

Back to His Roots

It was in 2016 when he started thinking of moving back to Africa. He had lived in the Middle East, Asia, South America, Europe, and the US, but had never lived in Africa as a grown man. He believed that this would be a good opportunity to come back to the continent.

Blockchain still remained an interesting idea for him and he felt that the African continent would really need it. His idea for blockchain adoption was particularly its deployment in governance. “I believed the technology would be ideal in addressing the many issues touching on governance,” Kamara says. “I also had the idea of using blockchain in trade, particularly in e-commerce, where there had been trust issues.”

Being an entrepreneur and a career person, Kamara joined Cortex Logic, a South African-based AI company as the CEO. He was based in Cape Town, but still travelled across the continent.

In the course of his work, he learnt on how AI and blockchain could be integrated with each other and how these two smart technologies could work together to change the tech face of the continent.

Capitalizing on Africa’s Blockchain Revolution

Back then, in 2018, there was a great revolution in blockchain technology in Africa. For instance, many people began talking about the technology and cryptocurrency saw significant growth in that year through 2019.

The most impactful tech stories Kamara has witnessed began in 2019, including one in which his sister had partnered with several women and shared knowledge on bitcoin through a WhatsApp group, including contributing money to buy the cryptocurrency.

And that was the lightbulb moment for him because many people were embracing blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In the same year, a friend wanted to do a blockchain lottery, an idea which he thought would be interesting because the lottery industry had had many challenges previously; especially trust issues. He founded Afya Rekod, and AI Centre for Excellence Africa (AiCE) in 2019, both based in Nairobi.

Afya Rekod is a blockchain-based healthtech platform that is transforming medicare in Kenya and South Africa. It helps patients and medical professionals access real-time access to their health data and medical history, thereby making treatments faster.

Last July, Afya Rekod launched a universal patient portal in Kenya and South Africa. “Our tool now allows patients to create a portal with all their health data and most importantly gives patients sovereign rights of ownership of their data,” Kamara said at the time. That was after it raised $2 million in February 2022 to expand its operations across the continent.

AiCE is a leading data science and machine learning platform. It helps generate AI models to ease pain points in Kenya’s health and finance sectors. “We are commercially viable and sustainable, impact led and outcome driven with fearless conviction for change using data and AI for good. Insanely crazy for innovation that will create jobs and drive human wealth,” Kamara says on the platform.

The Birth of Adanian Labs

In 2020, he says, is the year that he decided to start the Adanian Labs project. One of the core pillars of the project became building blockchain projects. “I also thought of galvanizing the blockchain movement in the continent and the regulatory frameworks that allow crypto tokenization.” All these efforts were intended to get more Africans to be involved in the blockchain space.

While the younger generation in the continent had begun understanding and embracing the industry, the older generation seemed stuck, and had trust issues when it came to blockchain technology. He therefore decided to be a bridge that connects the two generations since he had an earlier understanding of both these parties.

He has since spent most of his time advocating for the technology, helping build products that work with blockchain, and engaging different people and getting data and their views on blockchain technology.

For him, it is mostly about the legacy – helping open doors for others. It’s about legacy regulation, legacy building capacity, legacy in helping to grow blockchain startups across Africa.

With the continued adoption of these technologies, most people in the continent, he avers, now hold cryptocurrencies due to the volatile nature of African currencies. They hold crypto as value for money. Stable tokens have similarly become the keyword after blockchain and bitcoin. And inevitably, Africans are becoming the largest consumers of stable tokens.

The Challenge with Tech Adoption In Africa

(The northeastern tip of the African continent / Photo by NODO News)

The key challenge with the technology adoption in the African context, Kamara says, is the lack of knowledge on how these technologies work.

It becomes crucial to first explain to African users what the technology can do for them, without trying to sell it to them.

For Kamara, his biggest drivers for success have been his curiosity and constant urge to learn. They have led him to venture into realms that he had never thought of.

Failure breeds resilience and Kamara has seen many startups in the continent fail for this reason. “They lack the resilience to stay calm when things don’t go their way.”

As an entrepreneur, Kamara says, you will always be pushed to your limits when things are not working. His advice, therefore, is that one needs to understand their own sense of resilience in the face of adversity.

“Dedication is also an important quality for any entrepreneur, it is even more important than talent,” he says. “It is dedication and resilience that got me from nowhere, to where I am now.”