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

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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.

十年前，我 19 岁，在东非旅行，在坦桑尼亚恩琼贝高地的一个村庄伊布米拉度过了一个夏天。村里没有学校，最近的一所寄宿学校距离这里一小时路程，每年学费几百美元，这对当地大多数家庭来说是遥不可及的，而这大约是我暑期打工两周的收入。我寄宿家庭的女儿安瓦里特当时 11 岁。我主动提出为她支付学费，并告诉自己，只要她想继续读书，我就会一直资助下去。

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.

今年夏天，她从达累斯萨拉姆大学毕业，获得了语言研究学位。上周她告诉我，她已被该校的斯瓦希里语硕士项目录取。恩琼贝地区只有大约 2% 的人能完成大学学业。她的目标是攻读博士学位，然后将所学带回该地区。

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.

她整个 18 个月的硕士课程（学费、注册费、杂费、书本费、用品费）总计 3,060,000 坦桑尼亚先令，约合 1,161 美元。由于进展顺利，我在力所能及的情况下不断增加资助的学生人数，并于 2021 年将其注册为 501(c)(3) 非营利组织——坦桑尼亚教育项目。目前，该项目资助了五名来自伊布米拉的学生，涵盖学费和医疗费用。

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?

在攻读博士学位期间，我保持了项目的规模，因为我不想做出自己无法保证维持十年的承诺；现在我已经开始了博士后研究，所以我觉得是时候超越个人薪水的限制来扩大规模了。长远目标是让村里的每个孩子都能获得教育和医疗服务。我有时把这个项目看作是一个缓慢的实验：如果孩子们能接受教育，这个村庄在一个人的一生中会发生多大的变化？

I’d also like to point people towards the Giving What We Can pledge to donate some percentage of their income to charity. While this is of course closely related to EA, which many people here are (both deservedly and undeservedly) not big fans of, it doesn’t require you to choose some specific charities or agree with their moral framework. Consistently donating money to whatever cause you personally value would make the world a much better place compared to not donating anything.

我还想向大家推荐“Giving What We Can”承诺，即捐出个人收入的一定比例用于慈善。虽然这当然与“有效利他主义”（EA）密切相关，而这里许多人（无论是否应得）并不太喜欢 EA，但这并不要求你选择特定的慈善机构或认同他们的道德框架。与什么都不捐相比，持续为你个人重视的事业捐款会让世界变得更美好。

I’ve been funding Microfinance loans, $25 at a time, for a while now. Just checked the numbers - I have spent only about 5K in total, made almost 68K for ~2900 loans (keep recycling the money when repayments come in). Lost motivation for a few years in between, after Covid. Used to think it is just $25, what difference can it make? I was totally wrong. $25 won’t even get a good pizza these days in most American cities, it is not a lot in the west. But it can have amazing purchasing power in Africa, parts of Asia etc.

我资助小额贷款已经有一段时间了，每次 25 美元。刚刚核对了数据——我总共只投入了约 5000 美元，却促成了近 2900 笔贷款，总额近 6.8 万美元（还款回来后我继续循环投入）。新冠疫情后，我中间有几年失去了动力。过去我总觉得这只是 25 美元，能有什么影响？我完全错了。如今在美国大多数城市，25 美元甚至买不到一个像样的披萨，在西方这不算什么。但在非洲、亚洲部分地区等地，它却能产生惊人的购买力。