Paxful is planning to expand its presence to South Africa after setting up operations in Kenya and East Africa. This will be followed by an Africa-wide recruitment drive with a focus on women.

While looking into expanding its presence in South Africa, Paxful is hoping to nurture as much female talent as possible. Currently, almost 40% of Paxful’s employees are women and the company is set to further increase female appointments in its offices across the globe, located in New York City, Hong Kong, Estonia, and Philippines.

While overall female participation in the broader crypto-economy, according to several sources including WEF, is estimated at between 1% – 5% globally, Paxful believes that growing female participation in crypto will be key to the sector’s continued innovation and success.

“Women are critical to the future of the crypto-economy and we are committed to fostering more diversity and supporting efforts to attract more women to make their mark in the industry,” says Ray Youssef, co-founder and CEO of Paxful.

“We’ve already seen the incredible contribution that women have made to the technology sector overall as founders, developers, product managers, investors and more. The crypto-economy could greatly benefit from the rich diversity of skills, perspectives, experiences and many other unique resources that women can offer. Further, in my opinion, women are decidedly better community builders, which is a very important factor in driving a peer-to-peer economy like the crypto space. At Paxful globally, many of our senior leadership roles are held by women.”

With millennials making up the bulk of Paxful’s customers in Africa, Paxful‘s recruitment drive in Africa includes a Student Ambassador Programme on tertiary institution campuses across the continent. Female participants from Johannesburg and Cape Town are already the top performers in the Programme. The Programme – made up of a series of workshops – educates and empowers youth who are interested in entering the crypto-economy and especially encourages entrepreneurship in the crypto-sector. To extend the Programme’s impact, students who participate in the initiative are financially incentivised to educate their peers about the bitcoin economy. To date, Paxful’s University education outreach has engaged more than 1000 students.

With over 2,5 million users globally and Africa being one of its top markets, Paxful has gained valuable insights into how consumers are evolving their use of digital currencies like bitcoin. Based on these insights, Paxful has become the first global peer-to-peer marketplace to have launched an official wallet app to make buying, selling, and storing bitcoin easy and secure for customers while on the move. The app has been available since May this year for both Android and iOS devices.

Commenting on the app Youseff says: “Our app allows us to make our platform more accessible to communities around the world. The majority of our customers access our website through their mobile devices, and this is just another step in that direction.”

“Our goal is and always will be to empower individuals through presenting the entrepreneurial opportunities of bitcoin and peer-to-peer finance. We all have our part in levelling the playing field and to ensure equal opportunity to pioneer the peer-to-peer financial revolution,” concludes Youssef.

In mid this month, the global peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace announced plans to scale up operations in Kenya and the broader East African region as part of its vision of facilitating financial inclusion to the unbanked and underbanked across Africa.

Established in 2015, Paxful enables users to buy bitcoin with each other using more than 300 payment methods, including M-Pesa, bank transfer, and PayPal, among other channels. The platform is one of the world’s largest peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplaces, with more than 2 million users globally and an average weekly trading volume of over $20 million.

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