Sarah Wahinya is a Web3 and fintech growth strategist and East Africa Lead for Stellar, a US-based blockchain firm, building the rails for Africa’s next wave of digital finance. She operates at the intersection of partnerships, market expansion, and developer ecosystems, helping global companies localise and scale across African markets.
- Explain your job to a 5-year-old.
You know how you have a piggy bank? Now imagine the piggy bank lives inside a phone, and it can talk to other piggy banks all over the world, even ones in places you’ve never been.
My job is to help grown-ups understand these new piggy banks, pick the good ones, and not be scared of them. Some days I’m a teacher. Some days I’m a storyteller. Some days, I’m the person reminding everyone that girls also want to play.
The grown-ups are still building the playground. I help them build it better.
- What does a typical day look like for you as a Web3 and fintech growth strategist?
It starts before coffee, usually with a market scan and a quick scroll through Discord, Telegram, and X to see what the community woke up to and what broke overnight.
From there, my day splits into three parts: building (campaigns, partnerships, growth experiments), talking (calls with founders, mentees, investors, and the occasional regulator), and writing (threads, decks, frameworks).
Somewhere in there, I’m answering DMs from women trying to break into Web3, drafting a launch plan, and explaining to my mum again what stablecoins are. No two days look the same. That’s half the appeal and half the chaos.
- If your role came with a warning label, what would it say?
⚠️ Caution: May cause irreversible vocabulary changes, an emotional attachment to charts, and the inability to attend dinner without checking your phone.
- If you weren’t doing Web3 and fintech, what would you be doing instead?
Probably storytelling, in some form.