Deborah Ojengbede builds blockchain solutions for Africa, empowering youth through NFTs, education, cross-border payments, and digital innovation.
Deborah Ojengbede is the co-founder of AFEN Blockchain Group (AFEN). Long before she became part of Africa’s growing Web3 conversation, she spent time studying the continent’s financial bottlenecks from the inside and imagined a more efficient alternative.
Before April 2021, when AFEN Blockchain Group was founded, Ojengbede spent over five years in banking, working across business development, strategy, innovation, women’s banking, and project management. Those years exposed her to familiar problems: slow and expensive cross-border transactions, limited financial access for young people, and the lack of credible systems to protect and monetise African creativity.
The deeper she went, the more she realised that the existing structure couldn’t solve the challenges she saw every day. Her conviction changed when she encountered blockchain technology. Instead of seeing crypto as hype, she saw utility for a continent with the world’s youngest population and a growing digital appetite.
That recognition became the starting point for AFEN. From the outset, Ojengbede positioned the company as a one-stop blockchain infrastructure provider for Africa, offering solutions that spanned culture, finance, education, and economic participation.
In a single day, AFEN raised $1 million, establishing Ojengbede as one of the continent’s emerging leaders in Web3.
AFEN developed a native NFT marketplace that allows African creators to mint, buy, and sell digital assets using the company’s $AFEN token. This marketplace was designed to address long-standing issues surrounding ownership and legitimacy, providing artists and cultural workers with a reliable way to authenticate and monetise their work.
In addition to the marketplace, she built AFEN’s education arm to address the knowledge gap surrounding blockchain. The company offers learning resources and blockchain courses targeted at young Africans, and it ties educational participation to incentives such as staking and rewards, encouraging people not just to learn but to interact with the technology actively.
AFEN’s work also extends beyond digital art. Through its flagship product, Changera, the company addresses cross-border payments and foreign exchange problems that affect millions of Africans. Changera reduces the delays, hidden fees, and inefficiencies associated with traditional remittance channels by enabling users to send and receive money with stablecoins.
This makes the platform especially relevant to freelancers, travellers, businesses, and families in the diaspora who consistently deal with high transaction costs.
The company has grown through strategic partnerships across Africa, including collaborations with platforms like LOOZR and decentralised exchanges aimed at expanding Web3 adoption. Its community spans countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana, and its combined ecosystem has influenced more than 100,000 users globally.
Away from her corporate work, Deborah Ojengbede is also known in Nigeria’s music scene as a professional drummer. She has performed with artists such as Rudeboy (P-Square), Nikki Laoye, Tems, and Frank Edwards.
