Training blockchain developers in Africa

When I got off the plane at Bole airport in Addis Ababa on the evening of January 4, I did not know what to expect. It was my first time in Ethiopia, and all I knew was that my Canadian colleague Dr Polina Vinogradova, an IOHK formal methods expert, and I were supposed to teach a three-month-long Haskell course to a class of young Ethiopian and Ugandan women. When our students graduated three months later on March 22, it was the highlight of my professional life. Words fail to describe how very proud I am of these courageous young women who sacrificed so much to attend the class, who worked tirelessly and hard, eager to start tackling some of the most pressing problems their countries face.

I stand humbled, not only by their fierce intelligence and passion, but also by their gentleness and kindness.

The course had been organized by John O'Connor, IOHK's director of African operations, in co-operation with the Ethiopian Ministry of Innovation and Technology, and the Ugandan government. We had 22 students, 18 from Ethiopia and four from Uganda. All the attendees had studied an IT-related subject at university, some were just graduating, others had worked for several years in software development or lecturing at university.

Most of the Ethiopian students were from Addis Ababa, but some were from far away and had to leave their family and friends behind to attend the course. The four Ugandan students lived in a hostel, spending three months in a country strange and foreign to them, not speaking the language and unfamiliar with local customs.

Teaching students with such diverse backgrounds sounds challenging, but the fact that none of them had any experience with functional programming in general or Haskell in particular made it easier: knowing other programming languages does not really help much when learning Haskell, and can even be counterproductive.

Haskell is the most important programming language used by IOHK. It is a functional language, whereas most well-known languages are imperative and object-oriented. Haskell is high-level, mathematical, extremely flexible and expressive, not really mainstream; an ideal language for setting out our complicated protocols and cryptographic algorithms efficiently and in a provably correct way.

Haskell is difficult to teach and to learn — not because it is intrinsically more complicated than other languages, but because it forces the programmer to learn a new way of thinking, to approach problems in a way unfamiliar to developers used to Java, Python or JavaScript. Learning Haskell is a mind-opening (and mind-blowing!) experience. After learning it, even if you never use Haskell again, you have a much broader perspective and have learnt to see problems in a different light. You will be a better developer, no matter what.

This is what one of our Ethiopian students, Bethelhem Teka, says about Haskell and the course:

Circumstances were less than ideal, and we were facing problems all the time. The traffic was horrific and some of the students spent three hours every morning getting to class.

The internet was unreliable, and most of our students did not have access at home, which forced them to stay late after class to work on their assignments. Even in the classroom, we suffered many an internet failure and were forced to distribute material on USB sticks from laptop to laptop.

One evening, I got frantic messages on Telegram from those students who had stayed late to work on their assignments: they had been locked in! A security guard had decided it was time for his dinner, locked them in and left. It took some frantic phone calls, picking up a ministry employee with keys and driving to the building to free the students. They kept their good spirits, though!

Some of our students had problems with their laptops — insufficient memory, intolerably slow processors or faulty keyboards. After a slow and painful start, IOHK eventually provided better machines.

The Ugandan students neither liked the cool climate, nor were they happy with the unfamiliar Ethiopian food. Addis is 2,500m above sea level and the second-highest capital in the world, so the climate is cooler than one would expect from an African city. Polina and I felt so sorry for the four of them during the first weeks, they always looked so miserable!

Another problem, at least in the beginning, was the fact that the students were used to an education system where asking ‘stupid’ questions was frowned upon and where teachers were often unapproachable. It took patience and encouragement to convince the students to open up, to show them that it was okay to ask questions and to interrupt us when there was something they did not understand.

The students also seemed to be used to a style of teaching and learning that focuses on theory. In the beginning, they followed our lectures well enough, but did quite poorly when it came to practical exercises and to applying what they had learned to actual code.

Once we realized this, we provided more examples and exercises, and had them write code as often as possible. Repeat the Haskell workflow over and over again. Write some code. Compile. Fix errors. Test. Repeat.

It is a challenging course and goes far beyond a mere introduction into Haskell. Many advanced topics and concepts are covered, and a lot of material is squeezed in. This puts pressure on the students and requires them to work hard. But it is worth it! After completing the course, the students can be proud of a solid understanding of Haskell and are prepared to work on real problems.

For one project, the students had to implement a peer-to-peer protocol, and they were really excited to see how the abstract concepts they had learnt could be applied. In Bethelhem's words:

One novelty in this course was a two-week section about Plutus, taught by Professor Philip Wadler, one of the creators of Haskell. Plutus is the smart contract language developed by IOHK for use on the Cardano blockchain; it has been implemented in Haskell and is very similar to Haskell, so our students were in an ideal position to learn about it.

Another student, Bethel Tadesse, had suggestions for the course and the Plutus part:

After almost three months of hard work, many struggles, countless internet and power failures, after learning esoteric concepts like monads and equational reasoning and down-to-earth applications with web servers and databases, after disappointments about poor test results and elation about steady improvements and ‘aha!’ moments, after learning and studying and working and eating and having coffee together, after medical emergencies, family tragedies and sicknesses, after many little and larger triumphs, much laughter and much joy, after being scared of ghosts on rooftops in the night (no kidding...) and avoiding countless shoeshine boys, it finally culminated with a beautiful graduation ceremony at the Sapphire Hotel in Addis Ababa.

Watched by proud family and friends, diplomats and industry experts, and journalists and philanthropists, the students were awarded their certificates by Dr Getahun Mekuria Kuma, minister of innovation and technology, and Charles Hoskinson, chief executive and co-founder of IOHK.

Nobody was more proud, though, than me. The women were all wearing Ethiopian dresses, they were shining with excitement and joy; they looked so beautiful, I had to fight back the tears. According to my wife, ‘They had always been beautiful, but success made them gorgeous.’

Read Polina Vinogradova's blog - In at the deep end in Addis