Sarah Idahosa is the founder of Women In DeFi, a pan-African non-profit that has reached over 8,000 women through blockchain education and decentralised finance (DeFi) since 2022. She also serves as Africa Partnerships and Sales Lead at MANSA, a stablecoin liquidity provider backed by Tether.

Beyond her organisational roles, Sarah is a Web3 educator and speaker who has worked with Cassava Network, Myth of Money, Africa Tech Summit, and Mara. Her focus is making blockchain and DeFi accessible, particularly for women and newcomers to the space.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

When mummy and daddy want to send money to granny in another country, sometimes it takes too long or becomes too expensive for them, so I help build an easy and affordable way for them to send the money. In addition to that, I teach young girls so they are also able to use and build roads like that for themselves, so they are not left out.

• What did your path into Web3 look like, and what would you be doing if you’d never found it?

My path into Web3 wasn’t the usual “Oh, I heard about it and wanted to learn more.” It was more of, “Covid is here; we have to look for how to earn cash while at home.” I got into the space through an affiliate marketing platform someone had told me about. 

It was a means to earn Ethereum (which I didn’t exactly know what it was); I just wanted to earn some cash during the pandemic. From there, I decided to learn more, and I went down the rabbit hole but never got out. What exactly pulled me in was the community spirit and the fact that it was a new route in the tech space.

If I never found it, I’d either be working as a microbiologist or a model because I stopped modelling when I became fully active in tech through Web3.

• What’s the hardest part of selling Web3 to people who don’t trust it yet?

The hardest part is knowing that the scepticism is valid. A lot of people were introduced to Web3 between 2018 and 2020 as a get-rich-quick scheme. As a result, many bought crypto tokens blindly, traded without proper knowledge, or held on to unrealistic expectations. In the end, many of those hopes crashed and burned.

These days, I don’t even bother leading with technological jargon. Instead, I focus on the solutions being built with the technology, tailoring the conversation to whoever I’m speaking to.

• What’s the biggest misconception people have about DeFi in Africa?

The two major misconceptions, even though they sound contradictory, are that Africa is too far behind to participate actively because we are just consumers, and that Web3 is only for people who already have money to invest. Neither is true.

We already have active participants, including founders building great solutions to many of our pressing problems, especially on the payments side. We can now see more people using, and more businesses integrating, solutions like stablecoins.

• You said Women In DeFi has reached over 8,000 women since 2022. Why is it important to you that more people (especially women) understand DeFi?

I’d say it’s because Web3 presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rewrite the story of how women have historically been excluded from conversations around technology, finance, and access to credit and capital, especially in Africa.

When I entered the space, I realised women were still being left out of many of these conversations, and I felt compelled to do something about it while the technology was still new—before the bias became embedded in the systems we were building.

The 8,000 women in the community today aren’t just generic numbers. They represent hope and the possibility of a new reality where women are no longer bystanders, but active participants.

• MANSA is trying to fix payments in emerging markets. How close is stablecoin infrastructure to actually doing that at scale?

I’d say this is a lot closer than most people think. We’re already seeing many traditional payment processors integrate stablecoins to create cheaper, faster, and more efficient payment rails.

For an active trade corridor like China–Africa, we at MANSA have built a solution that enables transactions to happen seamlessly without businesses, especially SMEs, having to pay a premium.

While getting these solutions to the last mile remains a challenge due to regulatory restrictions, local liquidity constraints, and off-ramp infrastructure gaps, the ecosystem is far more receptive than it was a year or two ago.