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 Points: 64

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