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Ten years ago I was 19 and traveling through East Africa, and I spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. There's no school in the village. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which is out of reach for most families there and was about two weeks of summer job money for me. The daughter of the family I stayed with, Anwarite, was 11. I offered to pay her fees and told myself I'd keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going.

This summer she graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies, and last week she told me she'd been accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program there. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to get a PhD and then to bring it back to the region.

Her entire 18-month master's program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.

Since this worked out, I kept adding students as I could afford to, and in 2021 I registered it as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It supports five students from Ibumila now, school fees and healthcare. I kept it small while I was finishing my PhD because I didn't want commitments I couldn't personally guarantee for a decade; I've since started a postdoc, so it feels like the right time to grow past my own paycheck. The long-term goal is that every kid in the village has access to education and healthcare. I sometimes think of this project as a slow experiment. How much could the village itself change over someone's lifetime if the kids have access to education?

https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/ is the website. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees the money goes to the students. If anyone wants to fund Anwarite's master's specifically, it's here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-prog...

Happy to answer any questions or take any tips you all might have about doing this sort of thing.

Comments

codetiger•51m ago

Good work!!! I love what you are doing.

lukehandcool•49m ago

Thank you! It's just crazy to pay such a small fee and have someone excel as much as Anwarite did.

megaloblasto•49m ago

This is great. Thanks for sharing. I'm always happy to make a donation for education.

Weird HN type question. On your site you mention paying $5 for hosting the site but didn't mention that here. We're you able to figure out a free way to host?

doublerabbit•46m ago

A typo in the email on the page too.

Shouldn't it be @gmail.com not .org?

lukehandcool•45m ago

Oh man. Thank you so much. I'll change that when I get home. It should be .com

lukehandcool•43m ago

I wasn't. If I remember correctly I had to pay the $5 for proper security certificates to be able to put the PayPal link. The $5 just comes from my personal bank account so that is taken care of separately from the org. Thanks for donating!

prometheus1992•28m ago

This is amazing. I once adopted a kid's education who lived in Colombia. The organization would send me a letter with his picture every 3 months or so, giving me some updates of how the kid is doing in school etc. After about a year I asked the organization if i could say Hi to the kid on a video call (i think i was watching some show on netflix or prime, where the main plot was how seemingly non profits scamming donors or something like that). I kinda grew suspicious that how do i even know if these kids are real and if this money is actually going somewhere. The org said they can't do it, they can't arrange for the kid to say Hi to me on the video call. I decided to cancel the payment from that month's onward. I redirected that money to doctors without borders. I don't know if i did the right or not; the point is that trust is extremely important when it comes to non profit efforts and the donors need to be able to get some sense (even a teeny,tiny action) that this effort is real. Again, thank you for what you did. you sound like an amazing person.

lukehandcool•24m ago

I really appreciate this response. It's my biggest worry because I share the same skepticism as you. That's part of the reason I started doing this because I started question where my donations to bigger organizations were going.

I will say that I could arrange video calls for sure if you wanted to support a kid. I want to grow this as much as possible and trust is the way to do that. I'm all ears for anyone with any advice for how to build trust.

Thank you!

mapmeld•10m ago

I see where you're coming from, but it is not a penpal service either and they don't want to be passing messages. I traveled to a school in Uganda which had some students' education sponsored by Americans. They were real students, and the issues were usually student performance, if students had a problem or got pregnant would that affect their scholarship, etc. Knowing that it is assigned to an individual person is important for some donors, but you might just want to donate to doctors, schools, etc. in general.