Founding Cohort · Applications open
Africa's digital asset rules are being written. Someone has to implement them.
A 16-week fellowship for the people who will. You won't study compliance from a distance: you'll build one of Africa's most important compliance platforms while you learn.
Applications close 30th November, 2026. Programme begins 4th January, 2026.
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Learn, build and lead inside a live platform
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Modules, each ending in a named deliverable
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Tracks, mapped to five real careers
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Discount for early applicants
Regulation arrived faster than the workforce
Across the continent, virtual asset licensing regimes, stablecoin frameworks and FATF-aligned obligations are being introduced or drafted.
Writing a rule is a policy act. Supervising it, licensing against it, examining for it and complying with it are workforce acts, and the workforce does not yet exist at the scale required.
Everyone wants experience nobody will give
Almost every digital asset compliance role asks for prior digital asset compliance experience. There is no structured route by which a capable AML analyst, lawyer or risk professional acquires that first credible exposure.
That gap is the single largest barrier between African talent and a global growth sector.
Certificates confer vocabulary. Employers hire for output.
A certification establishes that you know the terms. It does not establish that you have written a policy someone reviewed, argued a position someone challenged, or delivered work an external party relied on.
The consequences are national, not personal
Where compliance capacity is thin, jurisdictions face de-risking, correspondent banking withdrawal, adverse mutual evaluation outcomes and the loss of legitimate innovation to better-regulated markets.
This is not a skills problem. It is an institutional one.
We think the fastest way to produce people who can implement is to give them real implementation to do.
So that is what this is.
Over 16 weeks, a selected cohort works inside the live build of the Legum Digital Assets & Compliance Dialogue : a convening platform for regulators, institutions and industry across Africa.
You are not its audience. You are its founding workforce.
The research it publishes, the sessions it runs, the partnerships it signs, the community it builds: Fellows produce all of it, supervised by practitioners who have done the work.
Learn. Build. Lead.
What you actually do
Three phases, weighted by time.
Learn
Weeks 1–5 · ~30% of your time
Thirteen modules across blockchain and market structure, stablecoins and CBDCs, DeFi and tokenisation, AML/CFT, the Travel Rule and sanctions, cross-border payments, consumer protection and data, RegTech and AI, policy craft, stakeholder engagement, leadership, systems thinking, and ethics.
Case-based. Practitioner-led. Pitched at professionals, not students.
Build
Weeks 6–12 · ~55% of your time
You join one of five tracks and ship real work: policy briefs, country studies, a pan-African regulatory tracker, produced Dialogue sessions, sponsor propositions, published research.
External audiences see it. That is the point.
Lead
Weeks 13–16 · ~15% of your time
You own a workstream, defend a capstone before an examination panel including an external examiner, and present at Demo Day to an audience of employers, regulators and sponsors.
You leave with a portfolio, not a PDF.
Five tracks. Five real careers.
You'll specialise in one: the same way you would in an actual organisation, with the same interdependencies and the same coordination costs.
- Policy & Regulatory Intelligence
- Build a regulatory tracker across 20+ jurisdictions. Author country studies. File consultation responses to live regulatory processes.
- Partnerships & Ecosystem Development
- Build the partner pipeline. Design the sponsorship proposition. Negotiate agreements that get signed.
- Programme Production & Operations
- Produce the Dialogue sessions. Build the playbook that makes them repeatable. Deliver the Graduation Summit.
- Marketing, Media & Community
- Build the audience, the newsletter, the community and the voice. Run the recruitment campaign for the cohort after yours.
- Strategy & Programme Leadership
- Develop the three-year strategy, the commercial model and the governance framework. Integrate the other four tracks.
Fifteen kinds of people. One shared trait.
Lawyers who keep getting handed digital asset questions. Compliance officers extending frameworks built for traditional finance. AML analysts whose case files now contain on-chain elements. Regulators supervising activity their institution is still learning. Engineers who build systems that later fail compliance review. Researchers who need practitioner access. Founders for whom regulatory uncertainty is the primary business risk.
What they have in common is not a CV. It's a bias toward finishing things.
What you get
- Founding Fellow status
- Permanent and non-repeatable. Cohort 1 only.
- A mentor
- Matched, for 16 weeks plus a 12-month alumni year. Minimum six sessions. Minimum three warm introductions.
- Published work
- Named authorship on research released under Legum's imprint.
- A portfolio
- Documented work you can put in front of any employer.
- Executive access
- Fireside chats with regulators, central bankers, chief compliance officers and founders.
- The network
- Your cohort, the faculty, the mentors, the alumni body, for life.
- A certificate
- Legum Compliance Institute, with grade classification. Verifiable.
- Talent Pool entry
- On merit. First consideration for roles across the Legum ecosystem and introductions to placement partners.
What it costs you
Time.
10–12 hours a week. Designed around a full-time job, two fixed live sessions, the rest flexible.
Attention.
80% live-session attendance is a gate, not a target. Fellows who disappear are not carried.
Money.
Every seat in the Founding Cohort is substantially discounted.
Timeline
- 1st October, 2026
- Applications open
- 30th November, 2026
- Applications close
- 14th - 18th December, 2026
- Written task and interviews
- 25th December, 2026
- Offers issued
- 04th January, 2026
- Orientation
- 16th April, 2026
- Demo Day & Graduation Summit
The Founding Cohort happens once
Everything after this is Cohort 2.
Ten to twelve hours a week, designed around a full-time job. Every seat fully or substantially funded.
Applications close 30th November, 2026.