#WriterKids — Thanks to Nigerians on the internet, a widow and her 7 kids have a home.

In April 2017, I wrote about this family living on the outer perimeter of the Le Meridien Ibom Golf Resort in Akwa Ibom, who desperately needed help. 24 hours after writing that post, we raised about N1,200,000. That’s when I realized we could actually go ahead and build that family a new home.

It is a great pleasure to write that that family is now living in their home, and the girl, Bright, the one whose writing started this whole adventure, is in a new school, and doing well.

Started from here

To here

Now we are here

The family actually has running water and electricity!

I can’t thank you all enough, for trusting me with your hard earned money, for patience, for inspiring hope. I tried to do a weekly project update, but wasn’t always able to, but you were patient. Thank you. From the kind, anonymous guy who sent N500,000 — I later learned it was a friend I knew, who later gave another million, to the Paystack team, which set up www.paystack.com/writerkids; from the big donors to the people who sent N500 because it was all they could spare. Thank you!

Twitter is awesome, really. Nigerians are even more awesome.

Accounting for donations

I started drafting this post two months ago, with details of all expenses, but I slacked on it, because hunting through months of bank records is not a lot of fun. But it’s people’s money, so it had to be done.

I have tried to detail all the expenses here (I hope to update this in a few days with dates of transactions):

We received N5,300,000 in cash donations, with about N700,000 more in promissory notes. N4,783,960 went into the building and school fees. An additional N112,000 went into project related costs (transportation, area boys, local chiefs, sundry expenses etc). Our balance of N404,040 will pay school fees for the next few years.

A personal note

I was looking for a project manager to oversee the building, when he offered to look over the work for a few days till I found someone. He’s retired, he said, so he has time, he said. He ended up making the one hour trip from Eket to Uyo three days a week on average. We couldn’t have done this without him, and I’m really grateful.

What is left?

Bright started a new school, and has a full time lesson teacher. We have to set up funds in an account to pay her way through secondary school, but that fund is not enough. I hope this will change soon. A bank I cannot name at the moment has offered to support that effort — we will work to make that come through. In the meanwhile, we will start the fund off with a seed.

Sustainability is not as easy as I had hoped it would be. Getting the mother of the kids into a new trade has proven a little harder than we expected. A combination of knowledge gaps and entitlement have slowed things on that front. We are currently looking for a local business adviser who could help her transition into a new business. We don’t expect it to be easy.

What have I learned about impact?

Inspiration is great, but impact is more valuable. This project has inspired me in so many ways. I’m more actively aware of the needs of others. But while hope is a great thing for one family, I am more convinced that putting energy and resources into efforts which benefit larger groups of people, has longer term impact.

This has inspired us to setup the Anakle Foundation, through which we will offer education and essential needs interventions at the lowest levels of society around Nigeria, whenever we can.

Our first project has helped support a borehole project to provide water to an IDP community in Adamawa State. As dry season continues, acute water shortage could lead to negative outcomes in these highly vulnerable communities. We hope to support at least 5 water projects across the North East IDP communities in the course of this year.

A computer lab for primary age kids

In 1991, my dad moved our family to his village because he had recently setup a fish farm on a 10 hectare piece of land leased from the village. We attended the primary school there, which at the time was not much different from any other government owned primary school. In December 2017, I returned to the school to find it in a sad state. The government tried to renovate the classrooms, but bad workmanship has only managed to make things only slightly better.

We will be setting up a computer lab for the school, and have already secured two rooms for it, with the support of the headmaster. The first stages of securing the rooms we need for the labs have already been completed. We hope to make it a place the children can look forward to spending time in. If we can build the same infrastructure kids in cities have, there’s not limit to what these children can become.

After all, this is the same place I came from.