Input Output Global (IOG), the engineering firm behind the Cardano blockchain, laid out its Africa strategy in February 2018 at the London School of Economics, where founder Charles Hoskinson addressed a twice-oversubscribed audience organized by the Cardano Foundation and the LSE Blockchain Association. The event was held at the Saw Swee Hock Centre, a venue with particular resonance: the LSE, founded in 1895, had played a documented role in Africa's independence movements and the anti-apartheid campaign, a connection that IOG's own account of the event flagged as relevant to the venue choice. Hoskinson had been discussing blockchain's potential for Africa in public speeches since at least 2014, including a TEDx address on financial inclusion, so 2018 represented an institutional escalation rather than a personal starting point. That LSE talk nonetheless launched a sequence of government partnerships, developer training programs, and infrastructure deployments across East Africa that now spans nearly a decade. The results are real, uneven, and worth examining on their own terms.

---

The Ethiopia Project: What Actually Happened

On May 3, 2018, IOG signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ethiopia's Ministry of Science and Technology covering two areas: training local developers in Haskell (the programming language Cardano is built on) and piloting Cardano-based tools in the country's agricultural sector, specifically coffee supply chain verification. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and one of the world's largest exporters, making the supply chain use case a pragmatic, commercially viable entry point with existing infrastructure and strong international buyer interest.

By 2019, IOG had run a three-month Haskell training course in Addis Ababa. The cohort was designed from the outset as all-female, drawing participants from Ethiopia and Uganda, with stipends provided. IOG publicly characterized the program that way at the time, including an official tweet stating "The first class is all-female." Haskell co-creator Professor Philip Wadler taught a two-week module on Plutus, Cardano's smart contract language (smart contracts are self-executing programs that run on a blockchain). Of 30 graduates, 7 were hired by IOG's Addis Ababa office.

In 2021, IOG and Ethiopia's Ministry of Education announced what was described at the time as the largest blockchain deployment globally: a digital identity and academic records system targeting 5 million pupils, 750,000 teachers, and 3,500 schools, built on Cardano using a credential framework called Atala PRISM. By June 2023, 38,000 pupils had registered on the system. That figure exceeded the pilot's initial benchmark of 10,000 but fell far short of the stated goal. The Tigray civil conflict (2020 to 2022) and subsequent government transitions pushed the project roughly a year behind schedule.

Hoskinson addressed the timeline in IOG's November 2024 retrospective: "When you do large-scale government programs that are very bureaucratic in jurisdictions that are growing into a digital economy, you've got to be patient." IOG said it funded the project entirely from its own corporate treasury: "This wasn't about money with us. It was about philosophy and the mission."

---

Atala PRISM Handed to Open Source

In December 2023, IOG contributed Atala PRISM to the Hyperledger Foundation, an open-source consortium. The project was rebranded as Hyperledger Identus in April 2024. IOG formally ended proprietary development in October 2024, though its engineering team continues to maintain the core codebase. Products including Midnight (a privacy-focused Cardano sidechain), Lace (IOG's browser wallet), and RealFi still use the Identus framework.

The handoff has practical implications for other African governments or NGOs considering similar deployments. Any organization can now adopt the identity tooling without depending on IOG as a commercial vendor, potentially lowering the barrier for replication in other countries.

---

A Maturing African Developer Ecosystem

The early approach, in which IOG led developer training and managed deployments directly, has shown signs of shifting toward community-led growth.

In February 2026, the Cardano Africa Tech Summit (CATS26) wrapped up in Nairobi as the capstone of a 12-city program that reached more than 500 developers across Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso. Local projects including land registry tools (HouseAfrica and CoVo) and community voting systems are being built on Cardano by developers outside IOG's direct programs.

A material part of what makes this non-IOG development economically viable is Project Catalyst, a $400 million innovation program for tech startups globally, with African projects among eligible applicants. The incubator iceaddis has served as an additional support mechanism within the ecosystem.

IOG's partnership with World Mobile, a wireless connectivity provider, addresses a foundational requirement: blockchain infrastructure is irrelevant to people without internet access. World Mobile has deployed more than 3,500 Air Nodes across more than 15 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, bringing connectivity to approximately 1.2 million previously unconnected users. Sub-Saharan Africa still has roughly 42 percent of adults unbanked as of 2024, according to the World Bank's Global Findex database, though the region leads the world in mobile money adoption at 40 percent of adults. That aggregate figure masks significant variation across the continent: Kenya has reached 90 percent account ownership and South Africa 81 percent, while Niger sits at 14 percent and Chad at 20 percent. IOG's country-by-country approach was structurally appropriate for a region where no single statistic captures the full picture.

---

Token Context

ADA, Cardano's native token, is trading at approximately $0.26 to $0.27 as of early March 2026, down nearly 38 percent over the prior 30 days. That performance matters in context: IOG has funded its Africa programs from its corporate treasury, and the health of the broader Cardano ecosystem affects its capacity to sustain and expand those commitments. The network's total value locked in decentralized finance applications sits at around $136 million, placing Cardano roughly 27th globally by that metric. Minswap (a decentralized exchange) holds about $36 million in TVL, followed by the Liqwid lending protocol at $32 million.

---

What Comes Next

On the technical side, a hard fork to protocol version 11 is pending, bringing Plutus smart contract enhancements. The Midnight privacy sidechain is approaching mainnet deployment. Cross-chain integrations via Wanchain have brought an estimated $80 million in net capital into the Cardano ecosystem in recent months.

For policymakers and developers across the continent evaluating which blockchain infrastructure to build on, the Ethiopia story offers a concrete case study rather than a whitepaper. The outcomes are modest relative to the 2021 announcements, but the trained developers, the open-source identity framework, and the growing community summit circuit are tangible. The gap between the original ambition and the delivered result is the most instructive part of the record.