Hacker News Post Details 10-Year Sponsorship of Tanzanian Student Through Master's Program

The post says Ibumila has no school. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which the author describes as out of reach for most families in the village and roughly two weeks of summer job money for him at the time. He offered to pay Anwarite's fees and told himself he would keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going.

About 2% of people from Njombe finish a university degree, according to the post. Anwarite's goal is to earn a PhD and then bring it back to the region. Her entire 18-month master's program, covering tuition, registration, fees, books and supplies, comes to 3,060,000 Tanzanian shillings, or about $1,161, the author says.

After Anwarite's progress, the author says he kept adding students as he could afford to and in 2021 registered the effort as a 501(c)(3) called the Tanzania Education Project. It now supports five students from Ibumila, covering school fees and healthcare. The author writes that he kept the project small while finishing his PhD because he did not want commitments he could not personally guarantee for a decade, and that he has since started a postdoc, which he sees as the right time to grow beyond his own paycheck.

The long-term goal, according to the post, is for every child in the village to have access to education and healthcare. The author describes the project as a slow experiment: how much could the village itself change over someone's lifetime if the kids have access to education? The post says nobody takes a salary and that, aside from bank fees, the money goes to the students. It links to the project's website and to a GoFundMe page for Anwarite's master's program specifically.