Mamadou Kwidjim Toure, Founder and CEO at Ubuntu Tribe

Questions:

The visionary man, Mamadou Kwidjim Toure, has led an initiative, Africa 2.0, to transform and empower the country by uniting a diverse group of young emerging leaders from all across Africa. Toure, who has been featured as one of the top 10 most powerful men of Africa by Forbes, has shared deep insights into his journey with CoinEdition in an interview.

1. You’ve had a long 20 years of career in the finance sector, and currently you are heading the Ubuntu Group as CEO.  Can you tell us the moment or realization that made you pivot into blockchain and token-based models?

I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to “do crypto.” My journey started in development finance, working with institutions like the IFC and the World Bank ecosystem, where I kept seeing the same paradox: Africa is one of the richest regions in natural and human resources, yet its people are among the poorest. There was clearly a structural problem in how value is created, stored, and distributed.

The real inflection point came around 2015–2016, when I began to deeply study blockchain. For the first time, I saw a technology that could hard-code transparency, fractional ownership, and borderless access into the financial system itself. Later, when we launched Ubuntu Tribe, the insight was simple: if you can tokenize gold down to 1 milligram and make it accessible from a basic smartphone, you are rewriting who gets to participate in the global store of value.

So it wasn’t a pivot away from finance; it was a continuation of the same mission with better tools. Blockchain and tokenization are, for me, the missing rails to deliver what development finance has promised for decades: shared prosperity, not just for institutions and elites, but for everyday people.

2. Why do you think blockchain and AI are essential for the economic empowerment of Africa?

Africa is young, mobile-first, and still largely excluded from traditional financial and data infrastructure. That combination is both a risk and a huge opportunity. Blockchain gives us a way to build trust where institutions are weak, and AI gives us a way to turn data and creativity into economic value at scale. Together, they compress the time it takes for a young African to go from “idea” to “global participant.”

On the blockchain side, tokenization allows us to connect our real assets—gold, commodities, infrastructure, even carbon and culture—to global capital markets in a transparent way. Instead of value being extracted and booked elsewhere, it can be shared more fairly, and people can hold digital claims to real assets from as little as a few cents. That is extremely powerful for savings, remittances, and resilience in volatile economies.

AI then sits on top as a multiplier and an equalizer. It can help farmers get better prices and forecasts, SMEs access credit scoring based on real behavior rather than lack of paperwork, and young developers build applications in weeks that used to take years for large teams. If we combine blockchain’s trust layer with AI’s intelligence layer, we can design systems where Africans are not just users, but co-owners and co-creators of the value they generate.

3. What are the problems the $GIFT gold fungible token is solving in terms of financial and social mobility?

Gold has always been a store of value, but for most people—especially in emerging markets—it’s been difficult to access in a safe, liquid, and affordable way. With $GIFT Gold, we took a very simple idea: make gold ownable by the milligram on-chain, 100% backed by audited, insured physical gold in secure vaults, and regulated under European law. That means someone can start saving in gold from around ten cents, directly from their phone.

The first problem we solve is accessible savings in a hard asset. In many African and emerging economies, people save in cash or unstable local currencies. By allowing micro-savings in tokenized gold, $GIFT helps protect purchasing power and offers a gateway to long-term wealth preservation. The second problem is mobility: because $GIFT is on-chain, you can send value across borders in minutes, not days, often at a fraction of the cost of traditional remittances.

There is also a social mobility dimension. When communities have an easy, trusted way to accumulate assets, they can start thinking beyond survival—investing in education, entrepreneurship, and local projects. In the long run, we see $GIFT as part of a broader ecosystem where tokenized real-world assets become collateral for credit, participation in DeFi, and collective investment vehicles that were previously reserved for the few.

4. In the African context, what are the biggest challenges that you’re facing right now in implementing blockchain-based asset models, and how are you navigating them?

The first big challenge is regulatory clarity. Many African regulators are still in the exploratory phase around digital assets. They are rightly concerned about consumer protection, capital flight, and systemic risk. At the same time, the absence of clear frameworks can slow down innovation and scare away serious players. Our approach has been to build under strong jurisdictions—like Europe’s MiCA framework for $GIFT—while engaging African policymakers through dialogue, education, and pilot projects rather than confrontation.

The second challenge is education and trust. For a farmer, trader, or teacher, “tokenized gold on a blockchain” is abstract. People need to see, touch, and understand the benefits. That’s why we invest heavily in partnerships with local fintechs, mobile money operators, and community organizations, so that digital gold becomes as intuitive as topping up airtime. We also emphasize that each token is backed by real gold in real vaults—this is not speculation, it’s asset ownership.

Finally, there’s infrastructure: connectivity, identity, and on/off-ramps. You can’t scale tokenized assets without reliable ways to move between cash, mobile money, crypto, and back. We’re solving this step by step by integrating with existing rails—cards, wallets, exchanges—and by designing our products to work on low-bandwidth devices. It’s slower than building for a fully banked market, but it’s also where the deepest impact lies.

5. How are Africa 2.0 initiatives supporting technological innovation and economic stability in society? What I ask here is the impact that is being created through this initiative

When we launched Africa 2.0 back in 2010, the idea was to create a “D-ink tank”—a think tank that does things—bringing together emerging African leaders with a shared vision for the continent. We developed a Manifesto for Africa, not just as a document, but as a roadmap to mobilize talent, capital, and policy toward shared prosperity.

In practice, Africa 2.0 has been a platform to prototype solutions: from entrepreneurship and youth employment programs to policy recommendations on governance, infrastructure, and digital transformation. It has helped incubate projects, convene stakeholders, and create a new narrative: that Africans are not victims of history, but co-authors of their future. Many of the leaders involved have gone on to launch companies, funds, and initiatives that are now shaping the tech and innovation landscape.

For me personally, Africa 2.0 was the “leadership school” that led to the Ubuntu Group and the Ubuntu Tribe. The work we do today in tokenization and inclusive finance is a direct continuation of that original mission: using cutting-edge tools to solve age-old problems. So the impact of Africa 2.0 is both tangible—in programs, policies, networks—and symbolic: it has helped shift the mindset from aid-dependency to co-creation and ownership.

6. Before exploring the blockchain, you have spent over a decade of experience in development finance. So, can you please take us through the advantages that blockchain brings that the traditional financial system lacks?

Traditional finance has done important things: it financed infrastructure, supported trade, and helped many countries grow. But it was never designed for inclusivity at the edge. It is expensive to serve low-income customers, slow to adapt, and highly centralized. In my years in development finance, I saw how capital often stopped at the level of governments and large corporates, with very little trickling down to the micro-entrepreneur, the farmer, or the informal worker.

Blockchain changes the physics of how value moves. First, it enables programmable trust: rules can be encoded into smart contracts, reducing the need for expensive intermediaries. This lowers transaction costs and allows us to economically serve a person who wants to save or send just a few dollars. Second, it introduces radical transparency: every transaction can be auditable, which is crucial in environments where corruption and leakages have historically undermined development efforts.

Third, blockchain enables fractional and borderless ownership. You can now hold a fraction of a building, a kilogram of cocoa, or a milligram of gold, and trade or collateralize it from your phone. That is something traditional finance has struggled to offer at scale without complex and costly structures. Importantly, I don’t see blockchain as replacing the old system overnight. I see it as a new layer that, if built responsibly, can extend the reach of finance to billions of people who have talent and ambition, but lack access to fair tools.