Thanks!
Initially, we planned to admit 100+ attendees, with the expectation of 120. As time went on, we adjusted this plan, given our better sense of our capacity, such as venue and expenses.
This is likely. There are applicants whose travel requests we cannot approve. For some of them, travel expenses are the main barrier to attendance. For those we cannot fund, we initially send them an acceptance email with a notification that their travel request has not been approved. In these cases, we confirm their admission only after they inform us they can still attend.
We have not relaxed our admission criteria. All admitted attendees pass our admission bar. At some point, we had to increase our bar for admission when we realized that we were reaching our target and applications were still coming in.
Not too surprised! However, the university students’ applications exceed our expectations, especially from Kano. We think this is connected to our community presence at Bayero University Kano.
We have received the expected number of applications from our existing community in Nigeria. Most applications from Africans come from individuals who have some form of engagement with EA (Effective Altruism). However, we also received several applications from people who mentioned hearing about the summit on Facebook or through their personal networks. We are still yet to fully analyze and categorize such data, but during the applications review, significant responses from individuals who do not engage with the community, specifically mentioning networks like WhatsApp groups and Facebook.
Thanks, Elliot.
Sharable recordings are on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwp9xeoX5p8N7W_pr9N4hWQrPp_0j5Qhj&si=ti1o7Fh-HGaDzpYh.