The Room Before the Wallets: What CKB × Kaze Unitour at Technical University of Mombasa Taught Us About Building in Africa:
Every ecosystem likes to talk about growth in numbers: transactions, wallets, total value locked. There is a quieter number that rarely makes it into a recap though. That is the number of people sitting in a room who, an hour earlier, had never heard the word “Bitcoin” used as anything more than a headline. That number mattered most when we walked into the Technical University of Mombasa (TUM) in August.
This is the story of how that room came to exist, what almost stopped it from happening, and why the questions students asked us ended up mattering more than the plans we had made.
Why We Made It Happen Anyway
The Unitour was never supposed to start at TUM. Pwani University was the original host on our calendar, and on paper the plan looked simple. But August landed in the middle of university holidays across Kenya, and the signals coming back were consistent. Lecturers and university stakeholders suggested we postpone. Pwani was not ready. TUM itself was hesitant for the same reason.
Every grassroots initiative eventually faces a version of the same choice. Wait for conditions to be ideal, or work with what is actually in front of you. We chose the second option. We reached out to the student clubs at TUM that were still active during the break, and together we worked out a way to make it happen in the time we had left.
That time came to about two weeks.
From Pwani to TUM in Two Weeks
Two weeks is not a lot of runway to plan an in person technical education event from scratch. Inside that window we had to lock a venue, coordinate with student club leadership, line up speakers, sort out logistics, and figure out the practical mechanics of teaching Bitcoin and CKB to an audience we had not met yet.
Some costs we had not budgeted for showed up along the way, the way they usually do when a longer planning cycle gets compressed into two weeks. We had to hire a projector. We needed extra audio equipment the venue did not have. We offered incentives to the student club co facilitators who gave up part of their holiday to help pull this together, because their local knowledge and their trust with the student body were worth far more than what we paid them. A handful of smaller logistical costs only revealed themselves once we were actually on the ground.
None of this is a complaint. It is simply what building outside a controlled environment looks like. Grassroots education does not happen in a lab with fixed variables. It happens in real universities, during real holidays, with real budgets that shift as the picture becomes clearer. Plans change. Line items change. What does not change is the reason you showed up in the first place.
Getting to Mombasa was its own part of the story. The group that made the trip included Wycliffe - Co-Founder at Kaze, Raphail - TUM student lead who was actually back home in Nairobi for the holidays and had to travel down with us rather than simply meeting us on campus, and David - who facilitated videography and photography to document the day properly. The route there was an eight-hour train ride followed by a one-hour boat crossing to reach the island where TUM sits. Flying would have cut that time down considerably, but the team made the trip overland and covered the same distance on the way back in a ten-hour bus ride to Nairobi. It is a small detail in the larger story, but it says something about what grassroots work actually looks like in practice. The same commitment that goes into building the event also goes into simply getting there.
What Happened When We Arrived
We had originally hoped for somewhere between 150 and 200 students. Seventy-two showed up.
It would be easy to read that number as a shortfall, and in a strict sense it was below target. But context matters here. Most of the university was still on holiday. The students who were around and willing to spend part of their break in a lecture hall learning about Bitcoin were overwhelmingly first and second year students, the ones with the least prior reason to already know what CKB or a UTXO even was, and the most reason to be curious about something new.
Seventy two people choosing to be there, during their break, for a subject with no course credit attached, is a different kind of number than two hundred people filling seats because it happened to be scheduled between classes. A full room does not automatically mean an engaged one. What we got instead was a smaller and more attentive group, and that trade-off is worth naming honestly, both because it is true and because it tells us something about how to plan the next one better.
Meeting a Community We Had Not Fully Anticipated
What struck us most was not the size of the room. It was who was actually in it.
Alongside TUM students, the event drew in members of the wider Mombasa community, including Swahili speaking and Giriama attendees who came to see what all this was about. When we asked around informally afterward, one thing became clear. Roughly 95 percent of the people in that room were encountering Bitcoin, CKB, UTXOs, and self-custody for the very first time.
That single fact reframes everything else about the day. We were not refining the understanding of people who already knew what a blockchain was. We were opening a door that, for most of them, had never been opened before, explaining not only what Bitcoin is, but why anyone would care about owning something digitally without a bank or an app store standing between them and it.
From Bitcoin 101 to Building Something Real
We started at the beginning on purpose. Bitcoin’s origins. Why self custody exists as an idea in the first place, and why owning a digital asset means something different from holding a balance inside someone else’s system. From there we moved into CKB and its UTXO based architecture, and how Kaze is built on top of that foundation, turning an abstract technical model into something a student could actually hold in their hand through an app.
Then came the part that mattered most. We stopped talking and let people do something. Students created their own self custodial CKB wallets live, in the room, on their own phones. They mapped locations around campus on Kaze. They learned that whatever they earned through the app could be cashed out directly through M PESA, a detail that for a Kenyan audience closed the loop between an unfamiliar technology and money they already knew how to use.
By the end of the session:
- 58 new CKB wallets were created
- Dozens of new locations were mapped on Kaze
- Every participant learned they could cashout & Spend CKB seamlessly through M PESA
- Everyone was connected into Kaze and CKB community groups for continued learning
Fifty-eight wallets is a small number by ecosystem standards. But each one represents a person who, a few hours earlier, had no relationship to CKB at all, and who now has a working entry point into it. That is not a KPI. That is 58 individual decisions to try something new.
The Question That Mattered More Than the Numbers
In the conversations after the formal sessions ended, a pattern showed up that we had not expected going in. Students were not only impressed by how fast CKB is, or by what Kaze could do. They kept circling back to a different kind of question. How do I build something like this myself?
Several asked directly about creating their own applications. Others asked us to come back and explain the underlying technology in even simpler terms, so they could move from using it to understanding it well enough to build with it.
That distinction is worth sitting with. There is a difference between someone who downloads a wallet and someone who starts imagining themselves as a developer inside an ecosystem. The first is a user. The second is a potential builder. What we saw at TUM(Technical University of Mombasa) was a room quietly sorting itself into both categories, with the second group asking louder questions than the first.
What This Means for CKB and Nervos in Africa
It is tempting in ecosystem communications to talk about adoption purely in terms of wallets created or transactions processed. But if 95 percent of the people encountering your technology are total beginners, then adoption is not only a number. It is a teaching problem. You cannot onboard people into architecture they do not yet have language for.
That has a direct implication for what future Unitours should become. Not a single lecture followed by a demo, but a growing and structured pathway. Beginner focused UTXO education, hands on workshops, live coding sessions where students watch something get built in front of them instead of just hearing it described, and, most importantly, a path that continues after the event ends. Follow up learning, developer onboarding, mentorship for the students who showed real interest in building rather than only using.
The success metric worth chasing is not simply how many people attended. It is how many people kept learning after we left, and eventually, how many of them became builders. That is a slower number to measure, and a harder one, but it is a far more meaningful one.
What We Are Taking Into the Next One
We are not going to pretend this run happened without gaps. Being honest about them is part of building something that actually improves the next time around.
- Plan earlier, with university academic calendars factored in from the start, so timing does not force compromises later.
- Coordinate attendance further in advance with universities and student clubs, to reach more students, especially those still returning from breaks.
- Bring more merchandise, so more students walk away with something tangible tying them to the day.
- Allocate more toward rewards, which help create energy for students encountering this material for the first time.
- Lock in logistics earlier, including equipment, branding, audio, transport, and facilitation support, rather than solving them at the last minute.
- Strengthen the visual identity of the Unitour so it feels consistent and recognizable across every university it visits.
- Lean further into beginner focused teaching, since the overwhelming majority of any given room will be new to this material.
- Build a clearer path for aspiring developers, through workshops, tutorials, hackathons, and mentorship that pick up where the Unitour leaves off.
None of this is a list of what went wrong. It is the shape of what a stronger second iteration looks like, built on what the first one actually taught us.
A Beginning, Not an Event
A wallet can be created in a few seconds. Understanding what it actually means to hold your own keys takes considerably longer. A transaction settles almost instantly. Trusting that it is real, and that no one can take it away from you, takes time to sink in. Anyone can download an SDK today. Becoming someone who builds with it usually starts with one person showing you that it is possible.
That is the real function of a Unitour. Not to turn a room into finished developers in one afternoon, but to create the first contact between an ecosystem and the people who might eventually build inside it. Africa’s role in that story is not as a market waiting to receive finished technology from somewhere else. It is a place where the next builders of that technology are currently sitting in lecture halls, on their break, curious enough to show up for something they had never heard of before.
Seventy two students walked into a room at TUM not knowing what a UTXO was. Fifty eight of them walked out with a wallet. A handful of them walked out asking how to build the next thing. That last group is small. It is also the whole point.
We will be taking this model to more universities across Kenya, and eventually further across the continent. Not because the first Unitour was perfect, but because the questions it produced were worth chasing further. If education is the infrastructure that everything else gets built on, then rooms like this one are where that infrastructure actually gets laid, one curious person at a time.
Special thanks to Neon, Nervos Nation, and CKB Build for their support, and to the Web3Clubs team at TUM for helping make this happen on a two-week timeline.