lukehandcool

Thanks for taking the time to write that out. I hope you're doing well and I'd be happy to talk more if you want to reach out to tanzaniaeducationproject@gmail.com

Yes! I was hoping someone from HN would tell me how to do this. Thank you!!

That is certainly a possibility. I'd love to talk more about it. You can reach me at tanzaniaeducationproject@gmail.com

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.

Thanks for the comment. Could you elaborate on getting a trusted source to vouch for the project? I think thats a great idea but I'm not sure where to start.

The idea I've had is to just keep funding as long as they want to keep attending. The reason I track specific kids is because I think it maximizes the impact rather than just funding one kid for one year, then running out of money so they to take a year off, then getting a donation to have another kid go for a semester, etc. The idea is if they start the program then they can keep going until they want to stop, or finish.

This is a bit of pressure on me as you might imagine, which is why I've kept it small until today. I want to make sure that if everyone stops giving then I can personally keep things going.

My hope now is to expand it to the point where x amount of donations mean another kid can join the program.

Seeing this response from HN has been really insightful and I hope to add more kids soon now that I see the reaction that people have.

Thank you!

Good question! I would love to. I started this when I had very little money as a college student. I could have donated 100% of my money and not made a dent in an American education. With Tanzania I was able to fund a student with so little money, so the leverage was huge.

Eventually I would love to do more work in the US. I'm a postdoc now so I'm still not in a personal position to make a meaningful contribution to an American education, but one day I plan to get there.

I'll highlight it more when I get home after work tonight. Thank you for the tip. I have set up the specific payment structure for PayPal. Thank you very much for the feedback!

Thanks for the comment.

Trust is key in any effort like this. I made some connections to a local church in Njombe (I'm not religious and neither is the organization, anyone is welcome) and met some of the most selfless people I've ever met (special thanks to Sister Theo) who help arrange transportation to and from the schools, and take the kids into town to get supplies, or arrange doctors visits when needed).

The money can be paid directly to the schools via western union and they send me receipts and even report cards.

Another helpful thing is that students have to take national exams in Tanzania at different stages of their education. Those scores get posted to the interent, so I can track progress that way too.

The truth is that there are many families who are working tirelessly to send their kid to school, so the motivation is already really strong in the village.

I go back every few years to check up on things, talk to the schools and give many many thanks to the nuns.

501c3 was fairly easy to set up. About as simple as an llc if I remember correctly, with a little more paperwork. I set it up in Idaho where my mom lives because I tend to move around a lot and she has a permanent address there, and the process is relatively simple in Idaho.

Thank you! Yes my goal is that this becomes a self sustaining project where people in the area are given the skills they need to transform their lives. Models like the ones you are talking about that create change and don't just supply aid I think are the most important in my opinion.

Thank you!

Thank you for this. I really appreciate it.

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. I do want to point out that the only overhead for my project is the bank fees. That is it.

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.

Thank you very much. When I was 19 I was convinced that my understanding of the world was wrong so I decided to travel to East Africa to see some of it for myself. Tanzania is a relatively safe place to travel and I wanted to learn swahili.

A friend of a friend of my parents heard that I was going and asked me to check up on a orphanage they were funding in the Njombe region. That's how I ended up in such a remote place. I helped work on the orphanage and spent time getting to know the village. That's where I met Anwarite.

I go back every few years to check up on things. It's quite the journey to get there.

I haven't though of documenting actual data points about this yet. I think that's a good idea. Any ideas on where to start?

Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much!!

Thank you all for the responses. I wasn't exactly sure how this would go over here. Someone pointed out that I have a typo in my email on the site (thank you!). I'll fix that when I get home from work tonight. The correct email is tanzaniaeducationproject@gmail.com (not .org) if you want to reach out

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!

I could arange this. Meeting in person is tough. It takes me about 40 hours door to door to get to the village from my house (plane ride, taxi to a bus station, 12 hour bus ride through the country, another taxi, then motorcycle for the last leg). However, if you wanted to support a specific student, I could absolutely arrange that. The cost varies from year to year with exchange rates but it comes out to around $1200 a year. Email me at tanzaniaeducationproject@gmail.com to talk more. Thanks!!

I wasn't. If I remember correctly I had to pay the $5 for proper security certificates to be able to put the PayPal link. The $5 just comes from my personal bank account so that is taken care of separately from the org. Thanks for donating!

Oh man. Thank you so much. I'll change that when I get home. It should be .com

That's a fair question. I made a decision early on that I wasn't going to push any student in any particular direction. They were free to pursue any education they wanted. Anwarite chose this route and I'm happy to support it.

However, just the fact that she is so educated, regardless of the degree, I think can make a huge impact on her village. Most adults I met there had around a second or third grade education at most. Many never went to school at all. The fact that she can speak English, use a vomputer, and teach could be transformative.

Thank you! It's just crazy to pay such a small fee and have someone excel as much as Anwarite did.

Are you suggesting proprietary software is safer than open source?

What happened to "we urge you to urge us to stop moving AI so fast"?

Yes I do! 5060 is tough because you have 8GB of VRAM. That means any model you load onto it will have to be smaller than that (a model that is 6GB on hugging face will take up 6 GB of VRAM just loaded onto your GPU, then need some more headroom for the actual inference).

So, you could get away with Qwen3.8 quantized to 1 bit which is available here: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF.

Now, depending on how much RAM you have, you can offload some of the inference to the RAM, but this is a performance bottle neck (less tokens per second)

I haven't tried the 1 bit quantization yet, but I often run the Q4 quantization on a 3090 machine I have Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf which is 17.6GB and fits nicely on a 3090 with 24GB of VRAM.

To run these models you need to download them (usually from hugging face) and run them with something like llama.cpp (I personally recommend this over ollama). If you are doing that you need a GGUF file which is available from many people on hugging face, most famously the account named "unsloth" which takes the Safetensors weights that a company publishes and turns it into these GGUF files which can be run on a desktop with llama.cpp.

With the 5060 you are limited. If you can get a 3090 you can do really great local work with Q4 Qwen3.8-27B

In my personal set up (which I will release fully open source soon), my qwen model can actually browse the internet as if it was me (you can actually watch it view pages, its pretty cool), which means your little local model can scrape up to date info off the internet.

Hopefully that was helpful. Open source is the future!

You should really assume that any information you give to a private model is going directly into a database. These companies don't care about your privacy. Local, open weight models are the only way to truly protect your data.

Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.