Helping Africa?

Question

Ok. So some of my class mates and me have decided that we want to raise money to give to the people of Africa. Have any Ideas of what we could do?

Answer 1

www.thepencilproject.com

EASY and rewarding...you can request a school in Africa to help...

Answer 2

Something that was really popular when I was in high school was having a pancake breakfast or chili lunch. Each student pays $5 and gets 2 or 3 pancakes and a juice or chocolate milk. (Or, for the chili lunch they get a bowl of chili, a bun and a drink.) You can buy boxes of pancake mix, syrup, etc, or get everyone to make the chili at home, etc. Get people to bring in pans, etc. Have a group of volunteers who will make the pancakes, serve up the dishes, etc etc. They're a lot of fun! We always made a lot of money on these. Often we'd have over 100 students. At $5 a head, that's $500 - minus any cost of pancake mixes, etc. It can be pretty big if you have a big school. Oh, and you can also talk to local grocery stores to see if they'll donate stuff to you.

Another option is to do the same thing but get the teachers to each do their own pot of chili or make their own pancake batter. Then the students can vote on whose they like best. We did that with a bake sale. Each teacher made cupcakes, tarts, squares, whatever, and the kids got to vote on which item they liked best if they purchased something. That gets more people involved because they want to see who will win, and it makes it a bit of a competition to watch as well. (That's what you would call a "stunt" to get people to pay attention to the event.)

Answer 3

A shorter and simpler answer to sum up what the poster above said - loan your money to Kiva.org.

You can choose business people in Africa to help, and when they have repaid the loan, you can loan it again to somone else.

Answer 4

To develop Africa, treat Africans as valued consumers not charity cases.

You are familiar with the images: starving children; men with machetes fighting a “tribal” war; women being raped; a host of strange diseases afflicting an obscure population. These are common perceptions that most people have of Africa . However, consider these contrasting images. A woman drives a Mercedes on her way to work as a bank manager in Guinea . Men and women chat in a restaurant, sipping on soft drinks and eating kamundele (“appetizers” in lingala) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A family of four watches the African Cup of Nations on a flat-screen TV in Cote’d’Ivoire. A man in Mozambique calls his cousin in Houston on his cell phone.

As an African who was born and bred on the continent, I can’t always reconcile the horrific images that I see on television with my own experiences. I know that Africans are consumers. They want and need goods and services to enrich and improve their lives just as much as people in other parts of the world do.

Cell phone companies understand the importance and value of the African customer. One of the most positive effects of capitalism I have seen is the efficiency of cell phone services in the DRC, my native country. The DRC is a place where the population is dissatisfied the current state of political and economic stagnation. Even so, cell phone companies have developed an efficient way to market and sell their services to people of all income levels and the Congolese love it.

Even better, these same companies provide high-paying professional jobs to many Congolese. One of my relatives is a supervisor at one of these cell phone companies. He is solidly in the middle class, by any world standard. He drives a nice car and has a beautiful house filled with nice furniture and a computer with high-speed Internet. We need more people like him in Nigeria , Uganda , and Ethiopia . It is a fact that when people have jobs and opportunities to live prosperous lives, there are fewer political and social conflicts. On my last trip to the DRC, I met a woman who used to work for a cell phone company but left because she decided that the company was not paying her enough. She opened a hardware store with her husband in the heart of Kinshasa . This is not an unusual step. Most Africans have to be entrepreneurial to survive on the continent.

Imagine if more companies settled in DRC to provide goods and services that people value. There would be more capital to invest in other productive activities like healthcare and infrastructure. There would be fewer starving children. In Africa , cell phone companies make more money per subscriber in than anywhere else in the world. In DRC, the cell phone providers are already feeling the pressure of competition as more companies enter the market and offer lower costs to customers. To have viable choices is truly to be human.

Like everyone, Zambians and Namibians value efficient transportation options, household products to clean and decorate their homes, affordable and nutritious food, health services, housing and all things that make life pleasing and comfortable.

Do you want to really “help” the continent of Africa ? Create a venture-capital fund to support nascent businesses, like the hardware store entrepreneur in the DRC. Maybe she has the potential to create the DRC’s version of Home Depot.

Exxon-Mobil: Build a business school in Angola . Bill Gates: Start a business plan competition for new companies in Africa to produce and sell malaria bed nets to African consumers. Yes, sell them; do not give them out as donations. Certain kinds of donations can be demeaning and incapacitating. If the African consumers value malaria bed nets, they will buy them, provided they are sold at reasonable prices. Tony Blair: Are there people in Cameroon whose lives are better because of the Commission for Africa ? The UN’s Millennium Development Goals are lofty. Rarely do countries develop as a result of a consensus created by a bureaucracy like the United Nations. Jeffrey Sachs: I am sure your heart is in the right place. But do Africans really need millennium villages?

Sound capitalistic actions will do more to build the continent’s middle class and create wealth in Africa than any “We are the World” sing-alongs and condescending corporate social responsibility activities. Conventional acts of charity benefit the giver more by making him/her feel valuable; these acts do not always address the true needs of the recipient. Building local and thriving businesses is the best kind of charity. Businesses, large or small, create jobs and countless of opportunities.

The people in West should see Africans as they see themselves, normal, albeit complex human beings, in need of self-sustaining opportunities and a comfortable train ride on their way to work.

Answer 5

ask local churches b/c they usually have a list of fundraisers that u can pick from or u could start ur own!