The OP is right in his assessment.
There are some traders who buy/sell bitcoin.
Bitcoin's actual usage in commerce is currently negligible.
Bitcoin in real life is even lower. Low education and poverty restricts access to the internet. Making it more unlikely that they have heard of it
If we'd get at least one broken economy going with bitcoin, then the rest would follow with ease. I think that Kenya is the leading target for us just because the wide popularity of mpesa and its similarities to bitcoins.
However we'd need proper internet access to the areas where poverty is high. Maybe by connecting those places to the rest of the world would give them a lot of knowledge and information. There are a lot of pretty good projects going that try to accomplish just that.