Mini scholarships for Tanzanian student contest winners

Big Idea

What if we could somehow convert diversity and cultural wealth into real educational advancement for talented, hardworking students in need?

Long Story Short

I want to create a system that creates opportunity for those who are willing to work for it, rewards academic effort with immediate, concrete benefits, and incentivizes the youth to value and respect diversity.

That’s why I’m raising funds for The Culture Bee, an online contest where Tanzanian students learn to read in an indigenous African language spoken by a marginalized community (the Maasai). The winning students get help with their school fees. The highest scoring schools will also get much-needed facility upgrades (repairs to beds, desks, cafeteria stoves, etc).

Who am I?

My name is Luke. I’m an American tech worker who has led a privileged life. I like to tell myself that I’ve worked hard for my career, but living in Tanzania over the past two years has impressed upon me that I am where I am in life because I HAD good choices, not simply because I made them.

People much smarter, better, and harder working than me will have few chances, if any, to advance how they’d like to, simply because of where they were born. The Culture Bee contest is the small and admittedly imperfect start of my trying to do something about educational inequality.

Contest Details

As mentioned above, It’s an online contest where Tanzanian students enter for free and must learn a language that’s new to them. They submit a reading performance video in that language to be rated by native speakers.

It doesn’t need to cost money to learn from members of your community with different backgrounds, so just about anyone can do this if they embrace the diversity around them! We’re also arranging help for them along the way.

This particular iteration (the pilot) is about the Maasai language. Look them up if you don’t know about the Maasai. They are pretty rad.

The winning students get help with school fees. The highest scoring school gets facility upgrades (desks, bed repairs in the case of boarding schools, lab equipment, computers etc).

The contest will culminate in a livestream finale on September 20, 2025 with Maasai cultural showcases, announcement of the winners, voting to select audience favorites, and more. If you’re reading this, you’re invited. It’s free to watch for everyone!

Progress and Next Steps

I have two schools on board and have partnered with three

NGOs here in Tanzania to get the cultural resources needed to pull this off. What I am working on now is funding and publicity.

To fill those needs, I’m doing the following:

How the Funds Will Be Used

All figures below concern net funds.

There will be 20 student winners in Tanzania and one winning school.

60% of the funds from this campaign will be evenly distributed to the student winners to pay for their school fees, at least in part. The mini-scholarship part of the title might make more sense now.

30% will pay for school upgrades for the winning school. This could be something as big as 10 laptops for school use or as small as 20 textbooks. One school in particular uses firewood for cooking and has requested a gas stove. I’ll do as much as I can based on the funding I receive and their specific needs, but the percentage itself is fixed at 30%.

For the open category winners:

First Place:

Second Place:

Third Place:

Audience Favorite:

2.5% will go providing backpacks, textbooks, and other school supplies for participants of the cultural performances during the livestream. These are Maasai students from rural areas of Tanzania.

The remaining 4% will be used to recoup at least some of the expense incurred in running the contest. Most of the legwork is a small team volunteering our own time at this point, but we still have these expenses:

Future Plans

Beyond just this pilot contest, I hope to create a sustainable, repeatable, and economically viable system, a series of contests, to generate opportunities for students in need, drawing on diversity as its main resource.

Once the concept is proven and the digital platform is created, it can be repeated over and over again as long as we have fresh ideas for the contest theme. It can be replicated in other African countries, in India, Mexico, and even in the US.

Conclusion

If you have any questions for me or just want to talk, find my contact info here . To follow our progress and get our Maasai-language learning resources, follow us on Instagram , TikTok , and YouTube !

If you’ve reached this point, I want to thank you for your time and consideration. May we never let our fear of failure stop us from doing good, even imperfectly.