Ten years ago, a 19-year-old traveler spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. The village has no school, and the nearest boarding school, an hour away, costs a few hundred dollars a year, out of reach for most families there. The daughter of the family he stayed with, Anwarite, was 11 at the time. He offered to pay her fees and promised to keep paying as long as she wanted to continue.
This summer, Anwarite graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies. Last week she was accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program at the same university. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to earn a PhD and bring her knowledge back to the region. Her entire 18-month master's program, including tuition, registration, fees, books, and supplies, comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.
Word of the arrangement spread, and he kept adding students as he could afford to. In 2021 he registered the effort as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It now supports five students from Ibumila with school fees and healthcare. He kept the project small during his PhD because he did not want commitments he could not personally guarantee for a decade. Now that he has started a postdoc, he feels it is time to grow beyond his own paycheck. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees, the money goes directly to the students.
The long-term goal is for every child in the village to have access to education and healthcare. He describes the project as a slow experiment: how much could the village itself change over one lifetime if its children had access to education? Readers can learn more at the project's website, and those who want to fund Anwarite's master's program specifically can contribute through a GoFundMe campaign.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing