Nkoso: Global crowdfunding platform for education | Hacker News Reader

Nkoso: Global crowdfunding platform for education

nkoso.org

21 pointschaseadam179 comments

Do you thinking providing funding to individual kids is more successful than creating a pool for everyone? I'd feel bad for the one student that for whatever reason happens to be overlooked by the internet, while their peer gets funded. What if you grouped students by school or class? That way the potential failure or rejection is shared by the group rather than just one kid.

I think people prefer to donate to people vs a cause. I do like the idea of grouping students by class, however I want to keep the goal amount as low as possible. We are focused on making charity more accessible to the masses, so I want someone who donates $5 to feel like they have a direct impact. This would dilute if the goal was $1000 vs $100.

Is this the future of charity? The transparency on offer is really good in that you can see exactly how donations are going to help these kids. The concept has obviously been well publicized with watsi.org, and rightly so, its very benevolent.

My question is what are the overheads with this kind of organisation, how do you pay your own bills?

Many large non-profits (united way for example) will work with business donors who agree to donate and cover an operating fund so that all individual donations can go straight to the cause. The business donors understand that costs need to be covered and this leaves a more appealing value proposition for individual donors who want their money to go to a specific project.

That's a great question and it is one of the toughest problems with the model. We have decided to take a fee (3% of tuition) in order to cover our basic technical costs.

In order to become more sustainable we are building partnerships with other ngos who can benefit from our technology.

good luck with this. the good thing and the thing I admire about this and Watsi.org is you are using technology to benefit others.

Can you speak for a moment on how Nkoso compares to Vittana? They are the only other similar organization that I know much about and they have been working at it for a few years now with some good success.

Vittana is a great organization, we have a lot of admiration for them. The primary difference is the level of education that we focus on. Unlike Vittana we are helping students in primary school vs secondary or higher education.

That's awesome. I didn't make that distinction at first but you should be able to make even more of a long-term difference by helping children at this stage.

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