Alakanani Itireleng is utilising blockchain to educate, empower, fund, and connect Africans to inclusive and sustainable tech opportunities.
In 2012, Alakanani Itireleng was not a tech founder or a crypto advocate. She was just a teacher in Botswana and a mother fighting to raise enough money to save her son’s life. He needed a heart and lung transplant, a procedure that required more money than she could raise. In her frantic search for help online, she stumbled across something unfamiliar: Bitcoin.
At the time, it sounded strange, but driven by desperation, she dug deeper, learned how it worked, followed forums, and asked questions. When her son tragically passed away, her grief turned into a mission to use this strange new technology to help others access opportunities that Africa had long been locked out of.
Two years later, in 2014, Itireleng founded the Satoshi Centre in Gaborone. It became Africa’s first blockchain innovation hub and fundraising platform, built to support startups with mentorship, training, funding access, and community. The goal was to use blockchain to solve African problems.
Today, the centre educates developers, entrepreneurs, students, and even complete beginners on how to use cryptocurrency for practical needs like cross-border payments, healthcare records, digital identity, and smart farming tools.
Alakanani Itireleng and her team teach people how to set up crypto wallets, convert local currency into Bitcoin or other digital assets, and invest safely. She organises startup pitch competitions that connect African innovators to investors, opportunities that, until recently, were reserved for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley or London. Under her leadership, the Satoshi Centre has positioned itself as a bridge between local talent and global resources.
Alakanani Itireleng promotes blockchain access
Alakanani Itireleng is deeply committed to access and inclusion. She is fighting for Africans to understand and use blockchain and equally demanding that they take ownership of it. To this end, she helped launch a venture that turns animal waste into electricity to power Bitcoin mining machines.
It is a sustainable, Africa-rooted solution that tackles two problems of unreliable energy and limited access to digital infrastructure at once. With this project, she is proving that blockchain doesn’t have to drain African resources but can work with them instead.
Despite Botswana’s lack of clear crypto regulations, it has engaged the country’s central bank and financial institutions, pushing for safer systems and national infrastructure that support blockchain innovation. She also helped form the Botswana Blockchain Association to protect people from scams and offer a trusted knowledge base for the public.
Her impact has earned her international recognition, and she is still in Botswana, running workshops, mentoring women and youth, and still showing people that financial empowerment is possible through Crypto. Her work has seeded a new ecosystem in a country that once had no blockchain startups at all.
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