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I really appreciate this response. It's my biggest worry because I share the same skepticism as you. That's part of the reason I started doing this because I started question where my donations to bigger organizations were going.

I will say that I could arrange video calls for sure if you wanted to support a kid. I want to grow this as much as possible and trust is the way to do that. I'm all ears for anyone with any advice for how to build trust.

Thank you!

The simple solution is to always have such calls be monitored by another adult.

not sure if right for your project, but an idea ive had in the past is that the organizations should have the jobs filled by people from the places they are organizing support for.

too often the work involved in taking it to an organization level is written off by the doners, and / or taken advantage of by the org. but renting a building and hiring people to take calls, perform accounting, etc has real cost that cuts into donations but it is also an area of job creation. Those jobs created, imo, are incredibly important and when they are given to people in the donating country it turns into mostly just economic activity in the doner country run on donations with just whatever amount is leftover going to the actual aid. of which, without any outright corruption, people are always eager to spend that money to make the organization side of things better.. or invest it into the organization under the guise (genuine or not) of scaling the organization such that donating a bit less today leads to more donations tomorrow. and then it becomes like any other business mostly running on debt and the actual donations are like a material cost that is constantly pressured to be cut down to pay back debts

I completely agree with this and its what we are doing already actually. Currently everyone is volunteering and all the money goes to the kids (except for bank transfer fees). I mentioned in another comment how much help I've received from the local community and the schools which has made this whole thing work. My thought was to hire Anwarite after she completes her education (if she wants) and start employing local Tanzanians as the project grows.

As a side note. I was once in a remote part of the Caribbean. When I was there I saw a shack selling Tom's shoes (the ones where if you buy a pair they donate a pair to someone in need). It seemed to me that Tom's shoes had donated to the local government, who then sold the shoes to a merchant who was selling them at this market. That means the local cobbler was basically out of work while the shoes were being supplied, and other shoe venders were losing out on sales, overall having a negative impact on the economy. On top of that all, Tom's shoes are very low quality and the pair they donate is even lower quality so within a few months they would wear out.

Yes, donating clothes really doesn't help any more (if it ever helped). There is tons of stuff coming in, much of which is low quality and it's competing with local tailors.

I've made it a rule to only donate significant money (whatever "significant" might mean) to charities where I know the people and/or have visited them first hand. I love the idea of donating for a kid's education, and indeed have been "sponsoring a child" at jhamtse.org for the past several years. Because I've met the principles of the place, and have had family members involved on the ground there, I know the money is well spent. I know the "sponsorship" doesn't actually mean the money only goes to help that one individual kid, but I don't mind, and I like getting the updates about the progress of this particular boy.

The technology is finally here for scams to let you video chat with an artificial kid.

It would make sense to separate kids from the people who are donating money to them, but they could have offered to let you chat with the parents.

Same experience here with Virlanie in Manilla. The letter every 3 months seemed random, unrelated to the presents or letters I was sending, almost anonymous and generic, even if written by a kid. I feel horrible for having stopped the sponsorship (30€ per month), but I have to admit that I sponsored a kid because I wanted to feel a bit of affection, it's immature as an adult, but it didn't make me feel like I was having an interaction with an actual child. Maybe costs are higher than 30€ per month and they were pooling the donations and the letters.

Also the organization only talked about girls and never mentionned the boys in the schools. Unbalanced providence is a pretty important trigger to me, it's the source of my own suffering.

A lot of these orgs say you are sponsoring EG Jane's education but in reality the money gets spread across a whole school or region.

I see where you're coming from, but it is not a penpal service either and they don't want to be passing messages. I traveled to a school in Uganda which had some students' education sponsored by Americans. They were real students, and the issues were usually student performance, if students had a problem or got pregnant would that affect their scholarship program and scare off the donors, etc. Knowing that it is assigned to an individual person is important for some people, but you might just want to donate to doctors, schools, etc. in general.

This is a fair point. There is a way these things can overly performative. My thought was always that it's not supposed to make the donators feel good, it's just supposed to be something that they do because it's fair and right. I think most people, if they got to actually see this village, would understand what I mean.

That being said, I want people to trust the effort, and if that means having some sort of communication or feedback from the kids in the program, then I'm totally OK with that.

I think the most interesting thing about this is that no one but the kids benefit from this. I take zero payment and everyone involves is volunteering. It's not easy to find an organization that doesn't spend %30 of their budget on ads and overhead.

A con would've found a kid that could do that call for $5

Yeah, but then at least a kid is getting $5! /s

If it’s a con, the kid is probably enslaved.