Hi everyone 
Zcash East Africa has submitted a ZCG grant application for a 3-day in-person developer build session in Nairobi, followed by a public community demo day. We’d love your feedback.
Full application: GitHub issue link
Why this, why now
Over the past months, Zcash East Africa has focused on users and merchants: community meetups in Kenya, an event in Uganda, Africa Blockchain Festival 2026, and onboarding merchants to accept shielded ZEC.
Alongside that, our community has quietly started building:
- Community members integrated Zcash into KuvarSend, giving users a local on- and off-ramp for ZEC.
- Another member is building a shielded wallet. Shielded support is done, and it’s being polished now.
This month we’re running our first official developer meetup (virtual). This session is the next step: taking a selected group of developers from introduction to shipping.
What we’re proposing
Before the event: Community product call 
We’ll ask the community what products they’d love to see built on Zcash. Developers then choose from these ideas, so they build for real local needs.
Days 1–3: Build session (20 developers)
- Day 1: Zcash fundamentals, wallet setup, a first shielded transaction, and dev environment setup
- Day 2: Guided building across three tracks: payments and merchant tools, developer tooling, and privacy use cases for African users
- Day 3: Ship, test, document and publish to public repos
About 8 places are reserved for developers from outside Kenya (Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and others), with travel covered. Participants build against a hosted, synced node, so nobody has to sync on their laptop.
**Day 4: Community Demo Day **
Teams present to community members, merchants and guests, in person and livestreamed. People whose ideas were built get to see the result and give feedback.
Rewards that keep people building
The top 3 teams get Build rewards in shielded ZEC, paid in three milestones:
- 40% at demo day
- 30% after 2 weeks of continued development
- 30% after 4 weeks, once the project is deployed
We’d rather fund projects that keep going than demos that stop on Day 4.
Success looks like
- 30+ community product ideas submitted
- 6+ projects shipped with public repos
- 40+ community members at demo day
- 3+ projects still active 30 days later
- A full public report here on the forum
We’d really appreciate feedback, especially on the curriculum, the reward structure, and what you’d like to see East African developers build. If you’re a Zcash developer who’d like to join as a volunteer mentor or speaker (in person or remote), please reply below! 
Privacy • Community • Financial Freedom