An asynchronous (no pressure, allows people to get involved if and only when they want to), text-based (efficient, allows optimal, refined structuring of thought), online (the internet kills geographical constraint) forum. Twitter fulfills these needs except one, which is a big flaw for a certain kind of community: centralization. Twitter conversations are scattered and difficult to follow, have no structure or moderation to them, or an effective archiving.
Something like this needs to exist for several reasons:
(i) Poor intellectual culture in the first place means people of decent intellectual thought are sparse. The only possible meeting point is via the internet.
(ii) Widespread poor culture including anti-intellectualism means attempting to understand and do better/differently is strongly discouraged. Conservatism in this sense doesn't only exist on this front. It pervades all aspects of life. People need visible local platforms so that it becomes clear that it is fine to not default-align with the poor convention.
(iii) People of decent intellectual thought already participate on global discussion platforms. But there is something to be benefited from conversations with people with similar in-person experiences as you. Maybe they spark ideas on how to solve mutual problems?
The goal is simply improving the intellectual culture and encouraging people to engage with more interesting ideas, in the hope that this translates to collaborating on solving societal problems in-person.
Maybe it never works. But it is important to try anyway. If it works, long-term, then you have people organizing with people they were able to meet online (which allowed them to beat the geographical constraint) to achieve tangible goals.
The funding will be used to support the developer, administrator and writer (the forum will need a lot of writing by the creator at first to bootstrap things) while they work on this over the next year.
No one aside the poster. You can check out their personal blog here: https://buttondown.com/tZero19e/archive/
There are no pockets of intellectually interesting young Africans who collaborate, resulting in no prospect of a societal change and they simply grow up to become a part of what their societies has always been.
No amount of money has been raised.