Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

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 URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006366

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