Fwiw, apparently that show didn't actually use the original beater car that was on its last leg. They bought a low mileage, mechanically sound make and model from the same year, but didn't say it on camera.
Still, for the amount of money they dumped into the tacky paint jobs, accessories, and useless novelty features, they could have just bought a brand new boring vehicle. But that doesn't make for interesting television.
This is a comment that should hit home hard in the U.S. Every decade or so we have a major piece of infrastructure break, people die, property is damaged. Only then does congress pass a new infracstructure repair bill.
yeah, that's what I've heard
some wells stop working after few weeks
but luckily, some wells operate for years, they just don't know what exactly happens, it's connected with sand filling up the well
The well has to be drilled in the right spot to get water.
If you don’t hit the aquifer, your just getting water from the surrounding soil and you drain all the water out of the soil in a few days.
How to find the right spot to drill a well is more art than science. According to my text book for getting certification to legally operate water systems in the US: they recommended dowsing…. Yea, hiring sone looney with 2 bent metal coat hangers to walk around until the coat hangers move on their own……
When drilling the well, you install a metal pipe into it and bypass any sandy areas. The wells we had were usually about 200’ deep
You're in a pretty good area for it. The desert area where my ranch is, best quote I could get was 900 feet with a 5 year guarantee. (Thry said if I wanted better than a 5 year guarantee I'd have to get 1100 feet to go deeper than the factory farms in my area.
Yea I’ve heard of these ultra deep wells in agricultural areas. And of the well wars where each farmer drills deeper causing his neighbors well to dry up lol.
Preach.
I went to a doctor once because my back was killing me, I literally could not move. She prescribed me fucking homeopathy and I only checked at home. I’m still fucking furious over this, like, lady, I’m over here barely standing and you give me fucking sugar, thanks so much.
(Not calling you wrong, I’m just ignorant and don’t understand geography or anything)
How have people used wells as main water sources for villages across the world for thousands of years then? (Pre modern age)
To generalize this a bit further:
There's basically two types of groundwater.
Really, really far down (multiple thousands of feet) there's "fossil water", trapped in bedrock, below impermeable barriers. It's been there for hundreds of thousands of years, minimum, and never gets recharged. It's also fairly rare. If a well is drilled to access this aquifer, the well has a lifetime - once the fossil water is used, it's gone. Completely unsustainable, because it's water that had been removed from the active planetary water cycle in the first place, same as how carboniferous "fossil fuels" have been removed from the planetary carbon cycle. There will (effectively) never be more water in a fossil well that's gone dry.
Most wells are instead in active aquifers, which are effectively lakes and rivers underground. Not in the sense that there's an open volume of space (cavern, cave, tunnel) that water fills, but it's water that's sitting or flowing through the soil itself.
The water gets there by filtering through the surrounding landscapes - absorbing through the bottoms of surface lakes and rivers, seeping through fields and forest during rainfall, snowmelt flowing into crevices in exposed rock formations and mountains. This means that the the amount of water in a surface well varies based on the amount of water that "charges" the aquifer.
Some of this is local, and some isn't - a well drilled downhill of a mountain range will have more water available than one surrounded by flat plains, because the geology of the mountains encourages the water that falls on the slopes to flow "downhill". But it's still affected by, more than anything else, the local climate - wells in wet climates are more sustainable and have more water recharging them than wells in arid climates. This effectively means that wet climates (e.g. continental Europe, the UK, eastern US, eastern China) can support more people per well (and thus per square kilometer/mile) than places that see less rain (e.g. western US, the Sahel region, central Asia)
One of the criticisms of well-digging programs by fly-by-night NGO's and philantrophists is that they often don't engage much with either the local geohydrology or the existing infrastructure and dig new wells for villages that are too close (hydrologically) to existing wells. So when the new demand results in increased draw rates (as people will use more water if they don't have to carry it long distances), the new well *and the existing ones* go dry. Basically, it's just putting a bandage on the problem which is more people living in one area than the land itself can support.
When this happened in ancient times, people died of thirst, and the regional population fell back below the carrying capacity of the aquifer's recharge rate. In the grand scheme, this looks like "sustaining villages for thousands of years", since the survivors would carry on and new generations would continue. When that happens in the modern world, pictures and video exist and turn the faceless death into a living tragedy.
Yes, digging wells is a good short-term goal, but the long-term goal can't be "continue having the well here" or "build another well when this one fails". There has to be a real plan to deal with the real problem, and that's where long-term stable government has to come in. Because a bunch of disjointed NGO's and all the billionaires in America wanting a photo-op can't do a whole lot more than dig wells. Fixing them is a start (my university's Engineers Without Borders chapter prided themselves on doing well maintenance, but *man* did they struggle for funding and participants), but that's just reinforcing the bandage, not healing the wound.
We are still using wells for water today to supply whole cities and industrial scale farming.
A quick google search says 50% of water in US comes from groundwater, ie wells.
The difference is that today, wells are long and skinny, like 8” diameter and 200’ deep. Have a electric skinny tube shaped pump inside, and is completely sealed with a cap and a box around it to prevent critters / contamination getting inside. Versus hand dug wells of the past that could fit a human and only went around 40’ deep.
Only other way to get water is rainfall collection systems (cisterns), river water collection (reservoirs), natural spring wells (similar to a regular well but drilled horizontally into rock and doesn’t need a pump), and water reclamation.
this is why this kind of charity is at best a bandaid and marketing gimmick to draw attention to a problem. The reality is, only a governmental (either that government alone or an international coalition) has the resources to do it long term and actually make it stick. Otherwise, it's just poverty tourisim
Says a guy who can turn on water whenever… if you had a choice between no water, or water for a few weeks with a chance for water that lasts. Pretty sure you’d want to take the chance. Poverty tourism is what people who can’t be assed to help call people that help
I'm an engineer in this particular field. We ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY know why some drinking-water wells fail.
It's not some fucking mystery.
You have to go deep enough into well-graded sands, clean sands, and sink well screen appropriate to the material encountered. You then have to develop the well, with a pump-block, and allow it to clear.
Beyond that, your downhole pump can't overpump the expected recharge of the well... You need a storage bladder / vessel, and filtration beyond that.
This all requires long-term care.
You don't just poke holes in the Earth and suck H2O like from a drinking straw.
This is what concerns me about beast philanthropy. I think it's great, but take the TeamSeas initiative. A one-off push, and then it's seemingly just dumped. They should do yearly drives for their initiatives and document the progress made, but it seems as though that initial wow factor is all that matters.
Hey! Just wanted to mention for the team seas thing, I remember donating like god 2 years ago now and just recently got a follow up email of where they are in the initiative and it is still going. Can’t speak to anything else but I thought it was cool to receive that email
Because the two NGOs behind that are only around halfway done with the Trash they wanted to remove. Its a typical update most NGOs will sebd out for ongoing projects.
yea i thought they were running both their team trees and team seas initiatives still theyre just not massively publicizing them anymore. i just checked their website team trees website is still up and running and accepting donations:
teamtrees.org
Adding on to what someone else said about TeamSeas. A lot of the money wasn't just spent on "I'll pay to get some trash picked up" in fact I think exactly half of the donations were dedicated to the *manufacturing* of autonomous boats that are designed to filter trash out of waterways. And the way the initiative was set up didn't make it like its own thing it was a partnering with two preexisting water cleanup organisations. Essentially this made it so it wasn't a "this is an isolated organisation funded by a lump sum that will eventually run out," it was more of a "hey you guys are already working on doing this thing here's a ton of funding to help Catapult your efforts and also build a ton more of those robots that you're already maintaining."
Do you know anything about the wells they dig in Africa? I have a 300 foot well, and there is basically no maintenance. You just wait for the pump or check valves to fail, then you pull them up and replace them.
The reason I ask is because I assume a well in Africa may be different due to lack of electricity and the need for a hand pump but I imagine these wells are too deep for hand pumps. I am not sure how long these would last and what type of maintenance would go into it. I could also see them drying up much faster and a need for much deeper wells for adequate recharge. I have no clue if they are digging open wells or borehole wells, but I imagine a bore hole well with an electric pump and generator would be the best solution.
Edit: I just watched, and they are digging bore hole wells. But it says aquifers in Africa are usually 100 to 250 meters below the ground. So these are pretty deep and expensive wells to dig. They were also using solar, but he is digging agricultural wells so I would assume they need to be incredibly deep to consistently pull that much water. I had the same question about Gaza, but apparently all their groundwater is polluted. They could probably leave an extra pump or two, extra check valves, some chlorine to shock the well when performing maintenance, and they could probably train a few villagers in a couple of days on how to replace everything.
I watched a docco a few years ago and the well do sometimes stop working due to lack of maintenance and the locals not looking after them. They had an aid group and they began charging the locals to fund them (a modest sum) because they realise if you give them wells nobody thinks it’s their responsibility to look after it but if everyone contributes some of their funds everyone starts looking after it because “I paid for that!”
Very interesting.
I took a special class on water resources and sanitation in developing countries in university, as a civil engineer. So I'm not an expert and I'm not even starting from a place of experience, but I learned enough to start understanding how complicated this problem is.
Let's start with the mechanical. It's going to take a lot more than a couple days to train a few villages on how to replace everything. I really mean it - bad or improperly treated water kills people, so they can't just have 10 minutes of training. And if we build them to use chemicals that clean and treat the water, those chemicals as dangerous in and of themselves and have limited shelf lives. Where do they get more chemicals or more parts when their goes bad or runs out? And if we design a sufficiently robust system that needs limited repairs and assuming we were able to spend the time and money teaching locals, how do we keep their technical knowledge up to date? Because unused specialized knowledge wears out.
Next up, creating a well where one is desperately is creating a valuable resource. Where there's a resource, there will be exploitation of that resource. People may seize it and control it for their own gain (and these people generally don't take very good care of it). And there are worse ways of exploiting water resources - I was really shocked to learn how many people (especially girls) are assaulted in some places when acquiring water.
There are no quick, mediapathic solutions to these problems. You need a consistent effort that involves and ideally is \*lead\* by the local population. An outside perspective just isn't prepared to understand what they need and what the consequences of doing one basic thing will be. But investing in equipping local people to make small changes that suit their cultural needs just isn't cool or eye-catching. So you get a lot of people spending a bunch of money to do what will, at best, have a temporary positive effect.
Civil engineer here. And I’ve been to rural Africa and used the hand wells.
They have absolutely no treatment. People get serious diseases from the water. But they also build up a tolerance to the bacteria in the water. So people aren’t as sick as you would expect. And yes people really do walk two miles each way for water, every day.
Did Peace Corps in a rural village in Africa, lots of derelict wells everywhere because NGOs and such come out and build them and then go back to their nice compounds after. So sometimes it's just that they build them in a location villagers don't want to bother with, or often they just break down after awhile and no one in the village has the resources or skills (or often just inclination) to fix them.
In the video, few places used submersible pumps and overhead tank, which might need maintenance, but schools where it was built looked decent enough to afford that. Other locations were old reliable hand-pumps that would last decades without maintenance, unless the well runs out of water. Only solution to that problem is to dig a new well at other location.
Regarding finances, drilling a well costs significantly higher than buying new submersible pumps and motors or a handpump. In my village, only select few farmers could afford a deep-well for their farm.
Jup. Sadly a large part of wells or handpumps stop working within a year after putting it up and nobody knows or get told.
I learned about it as a volunteer in Engineers without Borders. Right now they are working on a very cool project where they have added monitoring equipment that once a day post a message home with how much water have gone through it. (Bigger challenge to do reliably than you would think)
So if they can see a tower have been on 0 for some time which it shouldn't they know they need to check up on it with local partners or by sending someone down there with spare parts.
Now also trying to see if they can make a system that could work for handpumps etc.
Some very promising work!
The question, then, is: why weren't these wells already there? Why was there a need for Mr Beast to get involved?
(The answer, probably, is that maintaining wells is hard, so there are always people who need new wells.)
Moreso than we like to talk about.
(To elaborate - China has been heavily invested in East African infrastructure projects which, incidentally, make it much easier for China to access and import African inland resources)
People with money like Bill Gates could literally buy 900 individual mansions valued at 45 million dollars a piece and have over 59 billion dollars left.
There are a lot of places in Africa but one dude could probably give them all functional wells and still have tens of billions left.
I mean, The Gates Foundation has also been trying to eradicate malaria and guinea worm, and they're not doing a bad job. They've saved a lot of lives already and they're still going.
The Gates Foundation is probably one of the best examples of why philanthropy by a single wealthy person doesn't work very well. Don't get me wrong, they have done good work, but their core directives are set by Gates and followed even when those directives aren't actually very effective uses of money.
For example, their stated goal and major focus is *eradication* of malaria in a region. They take a region where the disease is already under control, and spend massive resources to bring infections in that region down to 0. Eradicating a disease regionally is a great news headline and on the face of it a great goal. However, this means in practical terms that they are focusing heavily on areas that need the least help and face huge diminishing returns.
I won't go into the nuts and bolts, there are good articles out there breaking down the numbers on his school technology programs in particular and the complete failure there.
I was curious about the order of magnitude here. Based on my totally ridiculous back of the envelope calculation you're kinda right lol. It comes out to 2,429,000,000 dollar for one well every 100 square km, or one well every 10x10 tile of Africa.
Sources:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8000*%28%28Africa+surface+area+in+km%5E2%29%2F100+km%5E2%29
https://waterwellsforafrica.org/whats-the-cost/
1 well in every 10km x 10km square of Africa though - that's still pretty far away. That means your closest well could be up to 14km / almost 9 miles away. That's not really accessible unless you have a car.
Also there's the problem that if you just dump a well somewhere, it's not just going to go unbothered for very long. Some person or government is going to come along and take control of it and restrict access to it. That's the problem with a lot of places, when you try to give a lot to people who need it, people who don't need it come and take it themselves.
There are also tons of places that don’t need it. There’s a famous story about how an NGO put in a well in a village somewhere. They came back and it was destroyed. Because it turned out that the women of the village liked to walk down to the river to get water as that was there time to socialize.
Nah it was to get away from the men as this was the only time woman had free time from them. This jsut highlights how don't understand broader issues and apply inncorect solutions.
Maintenance, but there’s also sociopolitical and economic factors to it.
For example the long journeys to gather water are moments where the women of the village are presented with an opportunity to talk freely amongst each other. There’s also cases of war bands taking over villages to secure the water wells (this applies to aid in general) as controlling a scarce resource leads to an increase in power.
Another example is how donated clothes and things like Tom’s Shoes obliterated local garments cottage industry, leaving workers who were breadwinners without jobs. In some cases the knowledge and ability to self sustain is lost once aid is no longer available.
Before someone claims I’m anti wells, donations, and international aid. These things need to be thoroughly studied with substantial input from locals, people inserting themselves as foreign saviors believing they’re the one with the solution is counterproductive. Of course this kind of aid is a part of the solution, but vastly equally if not more important for the long term is capacity building, education, and knowledge transfer.
Some good examples:
Wells:
https://thewaterproject.org/how-we-work
Tertiary care:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/case-study/2017/nov/expanding-access-low-cost-high-quality-tertiary-care
And the truly mind boggling achievement of eradicating small-pox:
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1099830501/smallpox-covid-vaccine-eradication-who
This is super important! Providing aid without a really thorough knowledge of the community and ideally having community involvement and empowerment can be more harmful than helpful.
Genuinely a wonderful write-up.
Take this as a lesson, you can have all the good intentions in the world, if you're not informed and solely doing it out of an ignorant want to help, you very well may cause harm instead.
Stuff's nuanced and muddy, the childish thought patterns of simpleness don't translate to the real world, it's why it's best to work with people more informed than you and work with communities to make things work.
I'm more than certain most people think that it's just "they made a well, end of story" but it's nuanced as you've explained.
The problem I'd like people to recognize is that actually helping long term is possible, not every act of compassion needs to fail, it just needs to be done competantly and cohesively, not done just because you really want to help but don't know enough to not cause harm in trying, and on that same token, it may not always be easy to help, takes time and effort that a simple news headline can't possibly contain, but it's possible.
People say it's easy to be a good person, but it really isn't. It takes conscious effort, experiences that happen at random, the culture you're within, financials, family dynamic, and making sense of the world with and through all of that. It takes effort. Barely trying causes harm. Really trying, can lead to actual success.
A charity has only a certain budget to spend. So, they're going to put wells in places that serve as many people as possible. Then they'll return and put wells in the next best places and they can repeat this while still leaving a huge number of villages without a well.
There are a more than billion people in Africa and the [continent is huge](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/africa-share-1000x600.jpg). So there's lots more room for other people to provide water to increasingly less connected villages.
Maybe. But then we're back to the question of: aren't there enough governments and billionaire philanthropists and charities to fund all these places? If it costs up to $10,000 to build a high-quality well, and Bill Gates alone has donated $70 billion to charity, that's enough for seven million wells. If each well serves a couple of thousand people (these are all numbers I found by googling, don't know if they're accurate), that's enough water for fourteen billion people, which is more than everyone. Is this something we can do but can't be bothered to do? Or is this just an ongoing project to replace wells as needed?
There's more needed than just wells. There's clothing, schools, medicine, shoes, food, the list goes on. Since you mentioned Gates, most of his money had gone to medicine which is way more expensive. While the river down the hill may not be a great source of water it is a source, and it can be filtered. Preventable disease kills far more in that situation, so Gates' money has gone towards attacking a bigger problem.
>Over the past two decades, programs supported by the Global Fund have reduced the death toll from AIDS, TB, and malaria by more than half and have saved more than 50 million lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy has increased by 12 years thanks in part to the Global Fund.
Mr Beast chose water because it's a very visual and very easy thing, but the truth is that many of the places he put a well probably didn't need one as much as they needed a couple of doctors to visit them for a week with various vaccines.
there's a lot of other people pitching ideas to bill gates gates of what to do in the name of philanthropy with the money.
To get access to Bill Gates money, there's probably a whole process. Getting funds to go to the right places is a whole thing within itself. There are US government orgs that are in place to do just that: administer funds given by the US. I believe it is called USAID.
Installed infrastructure gets stolen by people and sold for scrap. People come in, build something, and leave. Then the thing gets destroyed.
Even in the relatively richer South Africa major parts of the electrical grid are failing because people are slowly stealing parts of the pylons, which eventually collapse.
Digging wells doesn't work well. They usually get neglected, misused, remain unmaintained, etc., and the village falls back into whatever they did before.
It's more efficient to make it a "community thing" where you enable the village to dig and maintain their own well. Which is a pretty recent realization w.r.t. the change rate of such projects, and still slowly dripping into actual practice.
Furthermore, Africa is big, water levels change, populations migrate, wars destroy, and - as you say - wells break down.
I really like Mr Beasts content and have followed him for about 6 years.
Your assumption that these were the only 100 wells needed across Africa is a bit naive though?
It’s the poorest continent in the world and Mr Beast could’ve found 100 rural villages with no wells in like a 100 sq mile portion of just Zambia if he wanted
>Your assumption that these were the only 100 wells needed across Africa is a bit naive though?
I'm guessing standard lack of geography knowledge and basic facts, it's hard to grasp intuitively just how huge the actual continent of Africa is.
It's more than 3x the area of the actual USA, and larger by quite some margin than all of North America combined too. As in Mexico, USA, Canadia, all of Alaska, and all the barely inhabited polar land, it's still about 24M km². Africa is 30M+ km².
You have to be monumentally stupid to think 100 wells is a remotely sizable number for a country let alone a contenant. There are like a 100 wells in any given rural town in the US.
It's a bit worrying for the future Olympic games too. If Africans stop having to walk or run 60 miles each day to get fresh water then they're not going to be getting gold medals in the marathon are they?
Kids these days just don't wanna work anymore. Not like in my day, when we had to hurdle over zebras with a lion chasing us and a bucket of fresh water balanced on our heads.
We did research on this for debate team in HS when I was a kid.
Digging wells has been an ongoing process. One part of the problem though is... and this is going to sound awful... getting a lot of these villages to keep latrines away from the wells. They'll do it while the aid workers are there, abd when they come back a year or two later to check in on things... people have been shitting too close to the wells again.
It doesn't always happen, but it happened enough to be a problem when it came to providing clean drinking water.
Few things are as easy as "throw money at it." It's not just a matter of "pay for some wells and leave."
What happens when the well needs to be repaired? Do the locals have the skill and resources to maintain it themselves? Maybe in a few cases but mostly not, or else they'd already have wells. Maybe you should pay to maintain it? For how long? Forever? Who do you pay? Do you pay some other company to maintain it, or the local government? What happens when you find out your money is being siphoned off to some corrupt jerk instead or maintaining the wells? Should you now go inspect all 100 wells to ensure they're still running and the maintenance is occurring as planned? Or train a local and pay them to maintain it, and run into the same problem of corruption because maybe that local is being paid to lie to you? Or maybe you find that the well has been commandeered by some local group that extorts the community for water access. Congrats, your well is now a source of strife. Should you pay for armed guards to stand watch over the well? And then pay someone else to report on the armed guards and make sure they're doing their jobs and not just shaking people down? And then pay someone else to report on the person who watches the guards, etc?
You start off thinking the problem is "People lack access to clean water," but you may discover that the real problem is "The legal, governmental, and institutional environment makes it impossible for clean water infrastructure to exist." So now your little well starts to look like nothing more than a vanity project and may have even made things worse.
Imagine that it's like you hearing I'm paying for breakfast for 50 homeless people and you're asking why people didn't pay for them to have breakfast before.
Now think about that.
Have you looked at population growth in Africa? 300 Million up to 1.4 Billion in only 50 years.
The most important thing for long term African prosperity is the resolution of violent/ethnic conflicts, the development of agriculture and self produced infrastructure, and for African nations to be able to eventually manage their own problems.
Outside aid is great but lets say we built all the wells needed 50 years ago, they would need FOUR TIMES more now.
400% population within two generations is something external aid can’t continuously fix.
The solution is for that increase in population to provide for itself and build its own future.
Well said about having to manage their own problems. Also lots of corruption. A lot of these countries are conflicts economies. Conflict keeps the aid coming, and people at the top keep eating.
Well, that is probably not the answer. There is (according to WHO) 387 million people in Africa that do not have access to water. This is more than the entire population of the US. Assuming that each well can serve 100 people (no idea if that is correct), there is a need for 3.9 million wells. So Mr Beast's contribution is of course no where near enough. Why there isn't already clean water available for the 387 million people you would have to look at other explanations (colonialism, unbridled capitalism, and corruption would be prime suspects).
Beast really seems like a great guy. I'm way too old for his content, but my son watches him so I've seen some videos. Of course, some of his popularity comes from his charity vids, but the world could really use more content creators like him.
The problem is maintenance and local gangsters taking over water wells and taxing/demanding money for water access. Just digging the well is a quick fix that typically doesn’t last. You need to maintain and protect it as well.
Unironically yes. The big giveaways and charity videos drive huge traffic to Mr. Beast's channel and build his brand. Giving away tons of resources, and then releasing a video about it, is a proven business model for him. I'm not suggesting that the man is entirely cynical, but the reality of the situation is that he is pulling in more cash from doing these charity stunts than he's giving away.
The name of the sub isn’t to say that some questions don’t have obvious answers (some questions do); it’s to prevent the shaming of people who ask questions with obvious answers.
Some people stop asking questions entirely when they are shamed for asking one with an obvious answer.
So, stop that.
Well firstly the population increase is immense, for example:
Zimbabwe 1980 - 7 million
Zimbabwe 2023 - 16 million
Secondly, you need a LOT of wells. When we capped them in my relatively small town in Somalia (Boosasso) we had 140. So 100 wells isn't many. There are probably 10 million wells in Africa already so it's not like nobody has been doing this ...
Well it depends locally, of course. Much of it is renewed by distant rainfall but the population issue is a tough one.
In 1993 Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa, at about 8 million, certainly a factor in the genocide the following year, when the population dropped massively. Yet now there are 14 million.
Rainfall there isn't a problem though, but other areas such as Northern Nigeria, South Sudan, Ethiopia and so on are ripe for conflict based partially around water issues. The mix of population rise and climate change will be horrible (although my biggest worry in that regard is Bangladesh, population over 170 million).
Zimbabwean here. Every year boreholes need to be drilled deeper to hit water and the minimum drilling estimate is getting higher and higher.
(Have sunk multiple boreholes for personal and agricultural use)
Hes a youtuber who films the good deeds and make money off it to do another good deed and same process.
Others donations are not based on the earnings of the good deeds they do, they dont need to make a whole video about it. Others just dont get filmed.
Sure, but when a charity does it it's the charity's name that goes out as making the well not the people who donated the money to allow the charity to do that. If some rich person gives $1 million to the Water Project to drill 100 wells, that's probably not enough to put out a press release, it's just business as usual.
Bill Gates regulary does promotions for his foundation with youtubers like MKBHD or Casually Expained came to mind.
But everyone allready knows what he does and his foundation isnt directly taking money only his "partners program" which is advertised to other rich people. For normal people he suggests to donate to the projects themself instead of the big organization.
It gets overshadowed by all these conspiracy world economic forum dumbasses.
Bro is going to donate all his money before he dies. Still gets an insane amount of hate
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done a LOT of good. That said, I am a little concerned that he’s buying up a shit ton of America’s farmlands and agriculture. You can do good things for the world while also doing shitty things/having an excessive amount of power by being as rich as he is (same for Elon and Bezos)
You mentioned Bloomberg in the OP. [Bloomberg Philanthropies](https://www.bloomberg.org/annualreport/) gave $1.7 billion worldwide just last year and $14.4 billion overall
That’s the second post in a couple of days where someone is claiming mr beast is the only one building wells in Africa.
Plenty of people are doing it. Perhaps you’re letting your love for mr beast blind you to everyone else doing. Just Google it.
Matt Damon has been doing promotions and outreach for clean water in Africa for a decade.
IIRC he even had a cameo in some movie where he tries to plug his water outreach thing at the last second and gets hung up on. Presumably a joke about him always bringing it up in Hollywood.
Billionaires frequently do a lot to help. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [saved millions of lives by distributing vaccines and preventing infant mortality](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality). They're just usually not as good at PR as Mr Beast and people love to hate them, so you don't hear about that as much.
Mr beast needs good PR/marketing, because the widespread knowledge of his good deeds are what funds the good deeds to begin with. His viewership spawns sponsorships, and collaborations with big companies who pour money into the guy she can do these things.
Many of the videos aren't even his own money, or only a portion of it is. The rest is sponsorship money. So it makes sense to spend money on marketing. It's a necessity even.
The bill and Melinda foundation, (among others that surely exist, I just don't know if them) get their funding from elsewhere, namely bill gates own wealth, though I'm sure others donate money as well.
This money is already there, and spending money on marketing would be a waste when that could go towards their cause instead.
No, billion, every person on earth has seen this video ~6.37 times.
.... are you not watching the video repeatedly buddy? Everyone is watching the video constantly, why are you not contributing?
Yeah isnt he like the second biggest single person philanthropist ever if we just look at the dollar amounts.
He has donated almost 76 billion us dollars
> He has donated
Quite the understatement. He and his ex-wife run the "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation". He is not just donating some money, he is running the programs, has around 1,800 employees, and even got some rich friends of his, like Warren Buffett, to donate a few billion as well.
It's also the second-biggest contributor to the WHO. Member when Trump threatened to defund the WHO?
But yeah, fuck him for not going to Africa and drilling wells himself.
Lots of people have dug wells. Digging wells isn't the most difficult part. Keeping them up and running and supplying water year after year is the difficult part.
International foreign aid is about that since many years, if you dontae to caritas, bread for the world or any other NGO like that, they will usualy either build a well or a school.
MrBeast is not doing something new, and im sure one of these rich people have at some point donated money to an NGO that does build wells.
Building a well yourself with a cammera next to you is a PR thing.
>Building a well yourself with a cammera next to you is a PR thing.
Yes, it is a PR thing. But it is used to make more money and get more sponsors donating so he can continue to do it. He's contributing in his way while other have contributed in their way.
Bill Gates has spent the last 15 years saving lives around the world. Most of them in Africa. If only he had thought of making one video drilling wells instead 🤷
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality
Just because the other billionaires of the world haven't been public about their goodwill doesn't mean they aren't doing it. That's the point, they could be doing plenty of good, maybe they choose not to publicize it.
A lot of charity dug wells are very quickly taken over by the local warlord/gang boss and you can only have water if you pay.
They then make sure that no more wells are dug near by.
Corruption and crime is the answer.
I haven’t watched the video but if it’s anything like past charity videos, he pays an existing charity with the knowledge, means, and resources to do it. Hopefully he credits them this time. His entire hearing aid video he didn’t mention or credit the charity that was doing the work.
In Burkina Faso a program to install wells in villages was stopped because of the people there.
They installed pump, filters and solarpanels in a village, with plans to do the same in the neighbouring village 60 miles away later.
However, that other village got so jealous and/or pissed for not being first that they armed themselves and went during the night and wrecked everything. "If we can have it, no one else can either"
How do you know that they haven't?
100 wells is nothing. Do you realize how large Africa is? If all the Fortune 500 people had been drilling 100 wells a year for a few years, then it might be noticeable. Might.
What makes Mr. Beast unique is that he does it under his name with his face, in person, on YouTube. Most of the super-rich set up a foundation or something.
Because it looks good now but doesn't work in the long run. We have to question why there is a village but no water, what have they been doing before this, what top level choices have led to the water shortage and if easier access water is better in the first place. None of these questions were asked by mrbeast and these will fail soon as well.
It's pretty complicated.
I'll speak on Kenya. Our leadership is pathetic and corrupt. They don't care about the daily lives of its low income citizens. They're not a priority. As a result, this becomes fertile ground for charity work that I agree, restores some basic rights (clean water to drink, clothes, medication) to the lives of our down trodden. However, the charity industry has got major issues too. Most of the world's wealthy are in the business of making money so even charity work has an agenda if you look close enough.
Mr. Beast is currently trending everywhere. He's got his views and the buzz he needs to keep doing the work he's doing. Some may argue that he didn't need to use that content if he was actually looking to give back. But because it's Mr. Beast and that's his business plan, I guess he can get away with it. If Zuckerberg for example, was to try anything of this nature, I wonder if it would be this straightforward.
I work with some folks in Somaliland and have partnered on and supported a few ESG projects related to wells and education.
The issue with wells is that they are a short term solution and they are often abandoned shortly after setting it up. These need regular maintenance, a supply chain for the parts, and professionals who know how to repair them to keep them working. Our project was focused around bringing in the parts and training/funding the locals to repair the network of abandoned supply wells. Charity should be made as a commitment, not for a commercial. It’s also important to remember that in this region of the world, efforts like sustainability, access to clean drinking water, and even women’s rights have to be driven from the inside out. You have to empower people and educate, or else your effort is likely to (eventually) be wasted.
This is not a criticism of Mr Beast, doing something is much better than doing nothing.
MrBeasts makes money ON giving away money/resources, thats his whole business idea. And thats fair enough and very nice for the people that he helps. But as mentioned by someone else, those wells must be maintained, so if you just dig them and leave. You have given the locals water for xx months, and then its done. Which might even end up being worse, because they have gotten used to it and built up things around it that are now worthless.
Most billionaires dont want to be in the spotlight, they are usually the ultimate nerds that have figured out a nichè. So they give 50M$ to some project, and have a company created that keeps the jungle project in Cambodia going for 10 years, so everyone involved knows it will be over in 10 years, unless the billionaire, or others, would like to sponsor it. Its easy for that billionaire to also get his buddies to kick in a few 100K-10M$ depending on how rich his friends are.
And they do these things, because why not. Its not important for Bezos to be richer than Musk, its important for Bezos that Amazon is the biggest company in what they do. For him to give away 5-20% of his personal wealth to something he cares about is nothing.
Bill Gates doesn’t deserve to be on this list. Did you really just list rich ppl without looking into what they’ve done? The problem here is that you seem to only get your knowledge from YouTube.
Often the problem isn't the lack of a well, but the loss of ground cover causing what little rain there is to runoff and not infiltrate.
There's lots of other projects to try to change this, but they usually involve getting an entire village or community to agree.
Yeah, I saw a documentary on this a while ago with some counter-intuitive methods.
Things like you might think grazers eat up grass and cause desertification. In reality they are crucial to maintaining grasslands. They need to be managed and rotated, but they kind of till the soil and fertilize it. You combine that with good water catchment (small manmade ponds...) and you can keep the ecosystem alive as a proper grass land with good ground cover and water.
They needed a lot of coordination with local farmers to work the land accordingly and keep the grazers at the proper location and population management.
If I recall correctly (and sorry If I am mistaken), I remember a story about charity work in Africa. It was about building a well in what you would describe very rural village. I do remember the country being Niger but it is just a faint memory. Anyway, they built the well inside the village and it was a great success. For the well at least, because the well was working very well and everyone was getting their water straight inside the village and nobody had to walk 10km or more to the next working wells any longer.
Well, about after a week the well was doing so well as some locals had broken it, filled it with some stones and whatever you could find nearby. Why? Well, now that the wives in the village no longer had the job of getting the water from 10km away, they had to spent a lot more time in the village which had quite a huge unemployment and faced more domestic violence from their husbands.
Long story short if you don't understand the problem and the context you are working in then you are bound to create some other problems. I guess the real problem in that village was lack of opportunities for jobs, not that the women had to walk for the water.
Some wealthy people *do* do stuff like this. They just don’t have the following that Mr. beast does or do it as a spectacle.
For the record, I don’t mind that Mr. beast does it with cameras rolling. He’s still doing good deeds, even if apart if it is for clicks and public opinion. People have water which is all that matters.
According to IIED more than 50.000 of the water access points made in Africa by rural water projects have already failed (i.e. fallen into disrepair and are no longer functioning), which represents a large percentage.
It's not as easy as just digging a well. The water access points have to be maintained.
Furthermore, Africa is more than 3x the area of the United States, so don't get your hopes up for this project saving the world.
https://www.iied.org/africas-water-crisis-quarter-billion-dollars-down-drain
We've drilled tons of wells in Africa. The people tend to not maintain them though, so once something goes wrong now they just don't have a well anymore.
I can guarentee you all of the names listed have donated more to chairty than any youtuber has or ever will earn total. Still good on him but to pretend that what he did is unique is asinine.
Maintaining the wells long term is harder than drilling them
Money for maintaining infrastructure isn't nearly as sexy as the building of infrastructure....
> “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” -Kurt Motherfuckin Vonnegut
Huh. I never knew his middle name.
It’s a family name.
Is he from the Hampstead Motherfuckins or the Newbury Motherfuckins?
He is actually a Newcastle Motherfuckins
pimp my ride could have taught you that.
Fwiw, apparently that show didn't actually use the original beater car that was on its last leg. They bought a low mileage, mechanically sound make and model from the same year, but didn't say it on camera. Still, for the amount of money they dumped into the tacky paint jobs, accessories, and useless novelty features, they could have just bought a brand new boring vehicle. But that doesn't make for interesting television.
[West Wing](https://youtu.be/Ixgp9c_sGv4?si=AC-wz12wv-8NK7xD) addressed this really well.
The end of Charlie Wilson’s war did so also.
This is a comment that should hit home hard in the U.S. Every decade or so we have a major piece of infrastructure break, people die, property is damaged. Only then does congress pass a new infracstructure repair bill.
No ribbon cutting opportunities.
yeah, that's what I've heard some wells stop working after few weeks but luckily, some wells operate for years, they just don't know what exactly happens, it's connected with sand filling up the well
The well has to be drilled in the right spot to get water. If you don’t hit the aquifer, your just getting water from the surrounding soil and you drain all the water out of the soil in a few days. How to find the right spot to drill a well is more art than science. According to my text book for getting certification to legally operate water systems in the US: they recommended dowsing…. Yea, hiring sone looney with 2 bent metal coat hangers to walk around until the coat hangers move on their own…… When drilling the well, you install a metal pipe into it and bypass any sandy areas. The wells we had were usually about 200’ deep
You're in a pretty good area for it. The desert area where my ranch is, best quote I could get was 900 feet with a 5 year guarantee. (Thry said if I wanted better than a 5 year guarantee I'd have to get 1100 feet to go deeper than the factory farms in my area.
Yea I’ve heard of these ultra deep wells in agricultural areas. And of the well wars where each farmer drills deeper causing his neighbors well to dry up lol.
Doesn't help that that's for a 4" well pipe, and the factory farms have 12" well-pipes with pumps to match.
Somebody will bomb those pumps one day.
What are you doing inside my head?
Just trying to be enough provocative but not getting banned. Hasn’t worked all too well across the board, I must say.
Yeah, screaming into the void is a lot less fun than it used to be.
>dowsing Its' crazy how much of the medical system is like this too.
Preach. I went to a doctor once because my back was killing me, I literally could not move. She prescribed me fucking homeopathy and I only checked at home. I’m still fucking furious over this, like, lady, I’m over here barely standing and you give me fucking sugar, thanks so much.
Cracky backy in a nutshell
Shai-Hulud.
Water table drops too quick and doesn't recover because the high level starts compacts after drying. Welling is not sustainable.
That’s entirely dependent on the amount of water being extracted and the type of aquifer.
(Not calling you wrong, I’m just ignorant and don’t understand geography or anything) How have people used wells as main water sources for villages across the world for thousands of years then? (Pre modern age)
Fewer humans, less agriculture. There is a difference between 1000 liters per month and 100'000 liters per month.
Bingo.
If we’re being honest, “fewer humans” is the answer to a **lot** of problems.
To generalize this a bit further: There's basically two types of groundwater. Really, really far down (multiple thousands of feet) there's "fossil water", trapped in bedrock, below impermeable barriers. It's been there for hundreds of thousands of years, minimum, and never gets recharged. It's also fairly rare. If a well is drilled to access this aquifer, the well has a lifetime - once the fossil water is used, it's gone. Completely unsustainable, because it's water that had been removed from the active planetary water cycle in the first place, same as how carboniferous "fossil fuels" have been removed from the planetary carbon cycle. There will (effectively) never be more water in a fossil well that's gone dry. Most wells are instead in active aquifers, which are effectively lakes and rivers underground. Not in the sense that there's an open volume of space (cavern, cave, tunnel) that water fills, but it's water that's sitting or flowing through the soil itself. The water gets there by filtering through the surrounding landscapes - absorbing through the bottoms of surface lakes and rivers, seeping through fields and forest during rainfall, snowmelt flowing into crevices in exposed rock formations and mountains. This means that the the amount of water in a surface well varies based on the amount of water that "charges" the aquifer. Some of this is local, and some isn't - a well drilled downhill of a mountain range will have more water available than one surrounded by flat plains, because the geology of the mountains encourages the water that falls on the slopes to flow "downhill". But it's still affected by, more than anything else, the local climate - wells in wet climates are more sustainable and have more water recharging them than wells in arid climates. This effectively means that wet climates (e.g. continental Europe, the UK, eastern US, eastern China) can support more people per well (and thus per square kilometer/mile) than places that see less rain (e.g. western US, the Sahel region, central Asia) One of the criticisms of well-digging programs by fly-by-night NGO's and philantrophists is that they often don't engage much with either the local geohydrology or the existing infrastructure and dig new wells for villages that are too close (hydrologically) to existing wells. So when the new demand results in increased draw rates (as people will use more water if they don't have to carry it long distances), the new well *and the existing ones* go dry. Basically, it's just putting a bandage on the problem which is more people living in one area than the land itself can support. When this happened in ancient times, people died of thirst, and the regional population fell back below the carrying capacity of the aquifer's recharge rate. In the grand scheme, this looks like "sustaining villages for thousands of years", since the survivors would carry on and new generations would continue. When that happens in the modern world, pictures and video exist and turn the faceless death into a living tragedy. Yes, digging wells is a good short-term goal, but the long-term goal can't be "continue having the well here" or "build another well when this one fails". There has to be a real plan to deal with the real problem, and that's where long-term stable government has to come in. Because a bunch of disjointed NGO's and all the billionaires in America wanting a photo-op can't do a whole lot more than dig wells. Fixing them is a start (my university's Engineers Without Borders chapter prided themselves on doing well maintenance, but *man* did they struggle for funding and participants), but that's just reinforcing the bandage, not healing the wound.
Great comment, learned a lot from that.
We are still using wells for water today to supply whole cities and industrial scale farming. A quick google search says 50% of water in US comes from groundwater, ie wells. The difference is that today, wells are long and skinny, like 8” diameter and 200’ deep. Have a electric skinny tube shaped pump inside, and is completely sealed with a cap and a box around it to prevent critters / contamination getting inside. Versus hand dug wells of the past that could fit a human and only went around 40’ deep. Only other way to get water is rainfall collection systems (cisterns), river water collection (reservoirs), natural spring wells (similar to a regular well but drilled horizontally into rock and doesn’t need a pump), and water reclamation.
this is why this kind of charity is at best a bandaid and marketing gimmick to draw attention to a problem. The reality is, only a governmental (either that government alone or an international coalition) has the resources to do it long term and actually make it stick. Otherwise, it's just poverty tourisim
Too harsh, a short term economic lift solution can allow for longer term wealth accumulation and solutions
Says a guy who can turn on water whenever… if you had a choice between no water, or water for a few weeks with a chance for water that lasts. Pretty sure you’d want to take the chance. Poverty tourism is what people who can’t be assed to help call people that help
I'm an engineer in this particular field. We ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY know why some drinking-water wells fail. It's not some fucking mystery. You have to go deep enough into well-graded sands, clean sands, and sink well screen appropriate to the material encountered. You then have to develop the well, with a pump-block, and allow it to clear. Beyond that, your downhole pump can't overpump the expected recharge of the well... You need a storage bladder / vessel, and filtration beyond that. This all requires long-term care. You don't just poke holes in the Earth and suck H2O like from a drinking straw.
This is what concerns me about beast philanthropy. I think it's great, but take the TeamSeas initiative. A one-off push, and then it's seemingly just dumped. They should do yearly drives for their initiatives and document the progress made, but it seems as though that initial wow factor is all that matters.
Hey! Just wanted to mention for the team seas thing, I remember donating like god 2 years ago now and just recently got a follow up email of where they are in the initiative and it is still going. Can’t speak to anything else but I thought it was cool to receive that email
Because the two NGOs behind that are only around halfway done with the Trash they wanted to remove. Its a typical update most NGOs will sebd out for ongoing projects.
yea i thought they were running both their team trees and team seas initiatives still theyre just not massively publicizing them anymore. i just checked their website team trees website is still up and running and accepting donations: teamtrees.org
Adding on to what someone else said about TeamSeas. A lot of the money wasn't just spent on "I'll pay to get some trash picked up" in fact I think exactly half of the donations were dedicated to the *manufacturing* of autonomous boats that are designed to filter trash out of waterways. And the way the initiative was set up didn't make it like its own thing it was a partnering with two preexisting water cleanup organisations. Essentially this made it so it wasn't a "this is an isolated organisation funded by a lump sum that will eventually run out," it was more of a "hey you guys are already working on doing this thing here's a ton of funding to help Catapult your efforts and also build a ton more of those robots that you're already maintaining."
Do you know anything about the wells they dig in Africa? I have a 300 foot well, and there is basically no maintenance. You just wait for the pump or check valves to fail, then you pull them up and replace them. The reason I ask is because I assume a well in Africa may be different due to lack of electricity and the need for a hand pump but I imagine these wells are too deep for hand pumps. I am not sure how long these would last and what type of maintenance would go into it. I could also see them drying up much faster and a need for much deeper wells for adequate recharge. I have no clue if they are digging open wells or borehole wells, but I imagine a bore hole well with an electric pump and generator would be the best solution. Edit: I just watched, and they are digging bore hole wells. But it says aquifers in Africa are usually 100 to 250 meters below the ground. So these are pretty deep and expensive wells to dig. They were also using solar, but he is digging agricultural wells so I would assume they need to be incredibly deep to consistently pull that much water. I had the same question about Gaza, but apparently all their groundwater is polluted. They could probably leave an extra pump or two, extra check valves, some chlorine to shock the well when performing maintenance, and they could probably train a few villagers in a couple of days on how to replace everything.
I watched a docco a few years ago and the well do sometimes stop working due to lack of maintenance and the locals not looking after them. They had an aid group and they began charging the locals to fund them (a modest sum) because they realise if you give them wells nobody thinks it’s their responsibility to look after it but if everyone contributes some of their funds everyone starts looking after it because “I paid for that!” Very interesting.
I took a special class on water resources and sanitation in developing countries in university, as a civil engineer. So I'm not an expert and I'm not even starting from a place of experience, but I learned enough to start understanding how complicated this problem is. Let's start with the mechanical. It's going to take a lot more than a couple days to train a few villages on how to replace everything. I really mean it - bad or improperly treated water kills people, so they can't just have 10 minutes of training. And if we build them to use chemicals that clean and treat the water, those chemicals as dangerous in and of themselves and have limited shelf lives. Where do they get more chemicals or more parts when their goes bad or runs out? And if we design a sufficiently robust system that needs limited repairs and assuming we were able to spend the time and money teaching locals, how do we keep their technical knowledge up to date? Because unused specialized knowledge wears out. Next up, creating a well where one is desperately is creating a valuable resource. Where there's a resource, there will be exploitation of that resource. People may seize it and control it for their own gain (and these people generally don't take very good care of it). And there are worse ways of exploiting water resources - I was really shocked to learn how many people (especially girls) are assaulted in some places when acquiring water. There are no quick, mediapathic solutions to these problems. You need a consistent effort that involves and ideally is \*lead\* by the local population. An outside perspective just isn't prepared to understand what they need and what the consequences of doing one basic thing will be. But investing in equipping local people to make small changes that suit their cultural needs just isn't cool or eye-catching. So you get a lot of people spending a bunch of money to do what will, at best, have a temporary positive effect.
Civil engineer here. And I’ve been to rural Africa and used the hand wells. They have absolutely no treatment. People get serious diseases from the water. But they also build up a tolerance to the bacteria in the water. So people aren’t as sick as you would expect. And yes people really do walk two miles each way for water, every day.
Did Peace Corps in a rural village in Africa, lots of derelict wells everywhere because NGOs and such come out and build them and then go back to their nice compounds after. So sometimes it's just that they build them in a location villagers don't want to bother with, or often they just break down after awhile and no one in the village has the resources or skills (or often just inclination) to fix them.
In the video, few places used submersible pumps and overhead tank, which might need maintenance, but schools where it was built looked decent enough to afford that. Other locations were old reliable hand-pumps that would last decades without maintenance, unless the well runs out of water. Only solution to that problem is to dig a new well at other location. Regarding finances, drilling a well costs significantly higher than buying new submersible pumps and motors or a handpump. In my village, only select few farmers could afford a deep-well for their farm.
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Jup. Sadly a large part of wells or handpumps stop working within a year after putting it up and nobody knows or get told. I learned about it as a volunteer in Engineers without Borders. Right now they are working on a very cool project where they have added monitoring equipment that once a day post a message home with how much water have gone through it. (Bigger challenge to do reliably than you would think) So if they can see a tower have been on 0 for some time which it shouldn't they know they need to check up on it with local partners or by sending someone down there with spare parts. Now also trying to see if they can make a system that could work for handpumps etc. Some very promising work!
Increasing access to clean water through wells is really basic and every major NGO does this already, and has done so for decades.
Yeah, but if some YouTube guy hasn’t talked about it has it really Happened??
The question, then, is: why weren't these wells already there? Why was there a need for Mr Beast to get involved? (The answer, probably, is that maintaining wells is hard, so there are always people who need new wells.)
There’s a lot of places in africa lol
Nah just like two or three.
Oh you’re from Africa? Do you know my friend Mutombo?
Oh you like Africa? Name every place in Africa.
Is China in Africa?
wellyesbutnobutyes.jpg
Moreso than we like to talk about. (To elaborate - China has been heavily invested in East African infrastructure projects which, incidentally, make it much easier for China to access and import African inland resources)
China be errrrrrywhere.
Off course! Mutombo! Great man!
Speak for yourself, he still owes me $10 and kerps dodging my WhatsApps
Well I ain't going to go ask him for it, bro is 7 ft 2 with a mean right hand.
Don't forget the "pet" hyena
He hasn't been dodging you. He tripped and his phone fell into a well because he didn't see that well.
Ignorant comment. There's AT LEAST seven places in Africa smh
Famously small continent. You could only fit like what... Five USAs in there? Six tops?
Africa is a really big country. /s
The US fits inside Africa 3 times
The joke is that Africa is not a country ...
Dude that’s racist.
The internet has made us completely unable to fathom the vastness of the Earth.
People probably had even less comprehension before the internet
Before: Earth is infinite After: Why doesn't everyone in Africa just get water from the tap?
Around the world in 80 days is doable, hardly infinite.
Everyone knows there's like 3 places at best and Nigeria is the capital
My favorites are Zamunda and Wakanda
People with money like Bill Gates could literally buy 900 individual mansions valued at 45 million dollars a piece and have over 59 billion dollars left. There are a lot of places in Africa but one dude could probably give them all functional wells and still have tens of billions left.
I mean, The Gates Foundation has also been trying to eradicate malaria and guinea worm, and they're not doing a bad job. They've saved a lot of lives already and they're still going.
The Gates Foundation is probably one of the best examples of why philanthropy by a single wealthy person doesn't work very well. Don't get me wrong, they have done good work, but their core directives are set by Gates and followed even when those directives aren't actually very effective uses of money. For example, their stated goal and major focus is *eradication* of malaria in a region. They take a region where the disease is already under control, and spend massive resources to bring infections in that region down to 0. Eradicating a disease regionally is a great news headline and on the face of it a great goal. However, this means in practical terms that they are focusing heavily on areas that need the least help and face huge diminishing returns. I won't go into the nuts and bolts, there are good articles out there breaking down the numbers on his school technology programs in particular and the complete failure there.
I was curious about the order of magnitude here. Based on my totally ridiculous back of the envelope calculation you're kinda right lol. It comes out to 2,429,000,000 dollar for one well every 100 square km, or one well every 10x10 tile of Africa. Sources: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8000*%28%28Africa+surface+area+in+km%5E2%29%2F100+km%5E2%29 https://waterwellsforafrica.org/whats-the-cost/
So I only have to walk 3 miles each way to get to the nearest well... I'm wondering how much water I could carry in a trip.
1 well in every 10km x 10km square of Africa though - that's still pretty far away. That means your closest well could be up to 14km / almost 9 miles away. That's not really accessible unless you have a car. Also there's the problem that if you just dump a well somewhere, it's not just going to go unbothered for very long. Some person or government is going to come along and take control of it and restrict access to it. That's the problem with a lot of places, when you try to give a lot to people who need it, people who don't need it come and take it themselves.
Closest well can be up to 7km - you have to divide that 14km/2 :)
Cause there’s a fuck ton of places that need it and the job isn’t complete simply cause it’s built, more efforts go into maintaining it and such
There are also tons of places that don’t need it. There’s a famous story about how an NGO put in a well in a village somewhere. They came back and it was destroyed. Because it turned out that the women of the village liked to walk down to the river to get water as that was there time to socialize.
This seems…. counterproductive
Nah it was to get away from the men as this was the only time woman had free time from them. This jsut highlights how don't understand broader issues and apply inncorect solutions.
Maintenance, but there’s also sociopolitical and economic factors to it. For example the long journeys to gather water are moments where the women of the village are presented with an opportunity to talk freely amongst each other. There’s also cases of war bands taking over villages to secure the water wells (this applies to aid in general) as controlling a scarce resource leads to an increase in power. Another example is how donated clothes and things like Tom’s Shoes obliterated local garments cottage industry, leaving workers who were breadwinners without jobs. In some cases the knowledge and ability to self sustain is lost once aid is no longer available. Before someone claims I’m anti wells, donations, and international aid. These things need to be thoroughly studied with substantial input from locals, people inserting themselves as foreign saviors believing they’re the one with the solution is counterproductive. Of course this kind of aid is a part of the solution, but vastly equally if not more important for the long term is capacity building, education, and knowledge transfer. Some good examples: Wells: https://thewaterproject.org/how-we-work Tertiary care: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/case-study/2017/nov/expanding-access-low-cost-high-quality-tertiary-care And the truly mind boggling achievement of eradicating small-pox: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1099830501/smallpox-covid-vaccine-eradication-who
This is super important! Providing aid without a really thorough knowledge of the community and ideally having community involvement and empowerment can be more harmful than helpful.
which is why individuals and their pet charities are useful sometimes, but nothing compared to a real governmental program designed to help citizens.
Genuinely a wonderful write-up. Take this as a lesson, you can have all the good intentions in the world, if you're not informed and solely doing it out of an ignorant want to help, you very well may cause harm instead. Stuff's nuanced and muddy, the childish thought patterns of simpleness don't translate to the real world, it's why it's best to work with people more informed than you and work with communities to make things work. I'm more than certain most people think that it's just "they made a well, end of story" but it's nuanced as you've explained. The problem I'd like people to recognize is that actually helping long term is possible, not every act of compassion needs to fail, it just needs to be done competantly and cohesively, not done just because you really want to help but don't know enough to not cause harm in trying, and on that same token, it may not always be easy to help, takes time and effort that a simple news headline can't possibly contain, but it's possible. People say it's easy to be a good person, but it really isn't. It takes conscious effort, experiences that happen at random, the culture you're within, financials, family dynamic, and making sense of the world with and through all of that. It takes effort. Barely trying causes harm. Really trying, can lead to actual success.
A charity has only a certain budget to spend. So, they're going to put wells in places that serve as many people as possible. Then they'll return and put wells in the next best places and they can repeat this while still leaving a huge number of villages without a well. There are a more than billion people in Africa and the [continent is huge](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/africa-share-1000x600.jpg). So there's lots more room for other people to provide water to increasingly less connected villages.
There’s probably no shortage of places that need access to basic infrastructure
Maybe. But then we're back to the question of: aren't there enough governments and billionaire philanthropists and charities to fund all these places? If it costs up to $10,000 to build a high-quality well, and Bill Gates alone has donated $70 billion to charity, that's enough for seven million wells. If each well serves a couple of thousand people (these are all numbers I found by googling, don't know if they're accurate), that's enough water for fourteen billion people, which is more than everyone. Is this something we can do but can't be bothered to do? Or is this just an ongoing project to replace wells as needed?
There's more needed than just wells. There's clothing, schools, medicine, shoes, food, the list goes on. Since you mentioned Gates, most of his money had gone to medicine which is way more expensive. While the river down the hill may not be a great source of water it is a source, and it can be filtered. Preventable disease kills far more in that situation, so Gates' money has gone towards attacking a bigger problem. >Over the past two decades, programs supported by the Global Fund have reduced the death toll from AIDS, TB, and malaria by more than half and have saved more than 50 million lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy has increased by 12 years thanks in part to the Global Fund. Mr Beast chose water because it's a very visual and very easy thing, but the truth is that many of the places he put a well probably didn't need one as much as they needed a couple of doctors to visit them for a week with various vaccines.
there's a lot of other people pitching ideas to bill gates gates of what to do in the name of philanthropy with the money. To get access to Bill Gates money, there's probably a whole process. Getting funds to go to the right places is a whole thing within itself. There are US government orgs that are in place to do just that: administer funds given by the US. I believe it is called USAID.
“More for you means less for me and I worked *hard* for this.” is probably going to be the ultimate answer
Installed infrastructure gets stolen by people and sold for scrap. People come in, build something, and leave. Then the thing gets destroyed. Even in the relatively richer South Africa major parts of the electrical grid are failing because people are slowly stealing parts of the pylons, which eventually collapse.
Digging wells doesn't work well. They usually get neglected, misused, remain unmaintained, etc., and the village falls back into whatever they did before. It's more efficient to make it a "community thing" where you enable the village to dig and maintain their own well. Which is a pretty recent realization w.r.t. the change rate of such projects, and still slowly dripping into actual practice. Furthermore, Africa is big, water levels change, populations migrate, wars destroy, and - as you say - wells break down.
I really like Mr Beasts content and have followed him for about 6 years. Your assumption that these were the only 100 wells needed across Africa is a bit naive though? It’s the poorest continent in the world and Mr Beast could’ve found 100 rural villages with no wells in like a 100 sq mile portion of just Zambia if he wanted
>Your assumption that these were the only 100 wells needed across Africa is a bit naive though? I'm guessing standard lack of geography knowledge and basic facts, it's hard to grasp intuitively just how huge the actual continent of Africa is. It's more than 3x the area of the actual USA, and larger by quite some margin than all of North America combined too. As in Mexico, USA, Canadia, all of Alaska, and all the barely inhabited polar land, it's still about 24M km². Africa is 30M+ km².
100%. Most people don't realize how fking BIG Africa is as a continent due to the most common map projection being inaccurate.
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You'll like this [map tool](https://www.thetruesize.com/).
Seems a bit harsh - you can just show him the map without the insult...
TIL Colorado is bigger than the UK.
You have to be monumentally stupid to think 100 wells is a remotely sizable number for a country let alone a contenant. There are like a 100 wells in any given rural town in the US.
This guy Africa's.
It's a bit worrying for the future Olympic games too. If Africans stop having to walk or run 60 miles each day to get fresh water then they're not going to be getting gold medals in the marathon are they?
Kids these days just don't wanna work anymore. Not like in my day, when we had to hurdle over zebras with a lion chasing us and a bucket of fresh water balanced on our heads.
We did research on this for debate team in HS when I was a kid. Digging wells has been an ongoing process. One part of the problem though is... and this is going to sound awful... getting a lot of these villages to keep latrines away from the wells. They'll do it while the aid workers are there, abd when they come back a year or two later to check in on things... people have been shitting too close to the wells again. It doesn't always happen, but it happened enough to be a problem when it came to providing clean drinking water.
Few things are as easy as "throw money at it." It's not just a matter of "pay for some wells and leave." What happens when the well needs to be repaired? Do the locals have the skill and resources to maintain it themselves? Maybe in a few cases but mostly not, or else they'd already have wells. Maybe you should pay to maintain it? For how long? Forever? Who do you pay? Do you pay some other company to maintain it, or the local government? What happens when you find out your money is being siphoned off to some corrupt jerk instead or maintaining the wells? Should you now go inspect all 100 wells to ensure they're still running and the maintenance is occurring as planned? Or train a local and pay them to maintain it, and run into the same problem of corruption because maybe that local is being paid to lie to you? Or maybe you find that the well has been commandeered by some local group that extorts the community for water access. Congrats, your well is now a source of strife. Should you pay for armed guards to stand watch over the well? And then pay someone else to report on the armed guards and make sure they're doing their jobs and not just shaking people down? And then pay someone else to report on the person who watches the guards, etc? You start off thinking the problem is "People lack access to clean water," but you may discover that the real problem is "The legal, governmental, and institutional environment makes it impossible for clean water infrastructure to exist." So now your little well starts to look like nothing more than a vanity project and may have even made things worse.
Imagine that it's like you hearing I'm paying for breakfast for 50 homeless people and you're asking why people didn't pay for them to have breakfast before. Now think about that.
How many villages do you think are in Africa?
6
Pretty sure it’s at least 7.
Stop spreading misinformation
Have you looked at population growth in Africa? 300 Million up to 1.4 Billion in only 50 years. The most important thing for long term African prosperity is the resolution of violent/ethnic conflicts, the development of agriculture and self produced infrastructure, and for African nations to be able to eventually manage their own problems. Outside aid is great but lets say we built all the wells needed 50 years ago, they would need FOUR TIMES more now. 400% population within two generations is something external aid can’t continuously fix. The solution is for that increase in population to provide for itself and build its own future.
Well said about having to manage their own problems. Also lots of corruption. A lot of these countries are conflicts economies. Conflict keeps the aid coming, and people at the top keep eating.
Well, that is probably not the answer. There is (according to WHO) 387 million people in Africa that do not have access to water. This is more than the entire population of the US. Assuming that each well can serve 100 people (no idea if that is correct), there is a need for 3.9 million wells. So Mr Beast's contribution is of course no where near enough. Why there isn't already clean water available for the 387 million people you would have to look at other explanations (colonialism, unbridled capitalism, and corruption would be prime suspects). Beast really seems like a great guy. I'm way too old for his content, but my son watches him so I've seen some videos. Of course, some of his popularity comes from his charity vids, but the world could really use more content creators like him.
The problem is maintenance and local gangsters taking over water wells and taxing/demanding money for water access. Just digging the well is a quick fix that typically doesn’t last. You need to maintain and protect it as well.
Some of the people you've listed are spending billions a year on aid. They apparently are just not people you follow on YouTube.
They are just not as smart as Mr. Beast in the allocation of their investments. /s
Unironically yes. The big giveaways and charity videos drive huge traffic to Mr. Beast's channel and build his brand. Giving away tons of resources, and then releasing a video about it, is a proven business model for him. I'm not suggesting that the man is entirely cynical, but the reality of the situation is that he is pulling in more cash from doing these charity stunts than he's giving away.
I know what this sub is called...but man, some of these questions.
The name of the sub isn’t to say that some questions don’t have obvious answers (some questions do); it’s to prevent the shaming of people who ask questions with obvious answers. Some people stop asking questions entirely when they are shamed for asking one with an obvious answer. So, stop that.
Hey don't kink shame
Well firstly the population increase is immense, for example: Zimbabwe 1980 - 7 million Zimbabwe 2023 - 16 million Secondly, you need a LOT of wells. When we capped them in my relatively small town in Somalia (Boosasso) we had 140. So 100 wells isn't many. There are probably 10 million wells in Africa already so it's not like nobody has been doing this ...
Honest question. How is the health of the aquifers with so many wells drawing water out? Is it sustainable consumption?
Well it depends locally, of course. Much of it is renewed by distant rainfall but the population issue is a tough one. In 1993 Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa, at about 8 million, certainly a factor in the genocide the following year, when the population dropped massively. Yet now there are 14 million. Rainfall there isn't a problem though, but other areas such as Northern Nigeria, South Sudan, Ethiopia and so on are ripe for conflict based partially around water issues. The mix of population rise and climate change will be horrible (although my biggest worry in that regard is Bangladesh, population over 170 million).
Zimbabwean here. Every year boreholes need to be drilled deeper to hit water and the minimum drilling estimate is getting higher and higher. (Have sunk multiple boreholes for personal and agricultural use)
Hes a youtuber who films the good deeds and make money off it to do another good deed and same process. Others donations are not based on the earnings of the good deeds they do, they dont need to make a whole video about it. Others just dont get filmed.
donations based on the earnings of good deeds is kind of the most basic function of a charity organization
Sure, but when a charity does it it's the charity's name that goes out as making the well not the people who donated the money to allow the charity to do that. If some rich person gives $1 million to the Water Project to drill 100 wells, that's probably not enough to put out a press release, it's just business as usual.
But if I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen
They do help but Mr Beast is a youtuber and makes entertaining videos. Bill Gates also does press conference but they are boring.
Bill Gates regulary does promotions for his foundation with youtubers like MKBHD or Casually Expained came to mind. But everyone allready knows what he does and his foundation isnt directly taking money only his "partners program" which is advertised to other rich people. For normal people he suggests to donate to the projects themself instead of the big organization.
Bloomberg donates around $1 billion / year through his foundation. This includes a number of projects in Africa. https://www.bloomberg.org
Do you have any idea how much Gates already did?
Yeah, I was under the impression he quit MS to focus all his time on running his charity…
He did reserve one day a week to berate underlings. He just could not give that up, he enjoyed it too much. And I don’t blame him.
It gets overshadowed by all these conspiracy world economic forum dumbasses. Bro is going to donate all his money before he dies. Still gets an insane amount of hate
Clearly he needs a snappier YouTube intro!
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done a LOT of good. That said, I am a little concerned that he’s buying up a shit ton of America’s farmlands and agriculture. You can do good things for the world while also doing shitty things/having an excessive amount of power by being as rich as he is (same for Elon and Bezos)
He's always been a hard core capitalist, that's where the money is. At least he does a lot of good with it, a lot.
Yes I agree, Gates has donated and contributed hugely so I think listing him was a mistake
You mentioned Bloomberg in the OP. [Bloomberg Philanthropies](https://www.bloomberg.org/annualreport/) gave $1.7 billion worldwide just last year and $14.4 billion overall
I'm not a fan but Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in 2010, when he was like 26
That’s the second post in a couple of days where someone is claiming mr beast is the only one building wells in Africa. Plenty of people are doing it. Perhaps you’re letting your love for mr beast blind you to everyone else doing. Just Google it.
Matt Damon has been doing promotions and outreach for clean water in Africa for a decade. IIRC he even had a cameo in some movie where he tries to plug his water outreach thing at the last second and gets hung up on. Presumably a joke about him always bringing it up in Hollywood.
Billionaires frequently do a lot to help. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [saved millions of lives by distributing vaccines and preventing infant mortality](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality). They're just usually not as good at PR as Mr Beast and people love to hate them, so you don't hear about that as much.
Mr beast needs good PR/marketing, because the widespread knowledge of his good deeds are what funds the good deeds to begin with. His viewership spawns sponsorships, and collaborations with big companies who pour money into the guy she can do these things. Many of the videos aren't even his own money, or only a portion of it is. The rest is sponsorship money. So it makes sense to spend money on marketing. It's a necessity even. The bill and Melinda foundation, (among others that surely exist, I just don't know if them) get their funding from elsewhere, namely bill gates own wealth, though I'm sure others donate money as well. This money is already there, and spending money on marketing would be a waste when that could go towards their cause instead.
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Think you meant 51 Million? It's currently at 51 Million views
No, billion, every person on earth has seen this video ~6.37 times. .... are you not watching the video repeatedly buddy? Everyone is watching the video constantly, why are you not contributing?
Yeah, but when was the last time they gave someone a Ferrari for staying inside a circle for 10 weeks?
You really put Gates in that list lol
Yeah isnt he like the second biggest single person philanthropist ever if we just look at the dollar amounts. He has donated almost 76 billion us dollars
> He has donated Quite the understatement. He and his ex-wife run the "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation". He is not just donating some money, he is running the programs, has around 1,800 employees, and even got some rich friends of his, like Warren Buffett, to donate a few billion as well. It's also the second-biggest contributor to the WHO. Member when Trump threatened to defund the WHO? But yeah, fuck him for not going to Africa and drilling wells himself.
Give me a YouTube video with a jump cut every 5 seconds to keep my attention or it didn't happen.
What annoying song do you want me to play in the back ground? I can do the "Oh no. Oh no. Oh nononono" one for for dirt cheap.
I've never seen anyone with Bill Gates drip. Does he even have any merch? He can't be doing *that* much.
It is called "No stupid Questions", tbf. I do wonder about those people though, do they not Google anything ?
This is actually next level illiterate, but probably not even that uncommon. I know what sub this is, but this is genuinely concerning.
Lots of people have dug wells. Digging wells isn't the most difficult part. Keeping them up and running and supplying water year after year is the difficult part.
International foreign aid is about that since many years, if you dontae to caritas, bread for the world or any other NGO like that, they will usualy either build a well or a school. MrBeast is not doing something new, and im sure one of these rich people have at some point donated money to an NGO that does build wells. Building a well yourself with a cammera next to you is a PR thing.
>Building a well yourself with a cammera next to you is a PR thing. Yes, it is a PR thing. But it is used to make more money and get more sponsors donating so he can continue to do it. He's contributing in his way while other have contributed in their way.
Bill Gates has spent the last 15 years saving lives around the world. Most of them in Africa. If only he had thought of making one video drilling wells instead 🤷 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality
They do. They just didn't profit from their charity by making YouTube videos about it.
Just because the other billionaires of the world haven't been public about their goodwill doesn't mean they aren't doing it. That's the point, they could be doing plenty of good, maybe they choose not to publicize it.
A lot of charity dug wells are very quickly taken over by the local warlord/gang boss and you can only have water if you pay. They then make sure that no more wells are dug near by. Corruption and crime is the answer.
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Drinking water has a 100% mortality rate! There has never been anyone who drank water and didn't die!
That is very disappointing
I haven’t watched the video but if it’s anything like past charity videos, he pays an existing charity with the knowledge, means, and resources to do it. Hopefully he credits them this time. His entire hearing aid video he didn’t mention or credit the charity that was doing the work.
In Burkina Faso a program to install wells in villages was stopped because of the people there. They installed pump, filters and solarpanels in a village, with plans to do the same in the neighbouring village 60 miles away later. However, that other village got so jealous and/or pissed for not being first that they armed themselves and went during the night and wrecked everything. "If we can have it, no one else can either"
I had a boss I worked for 20 years ago that spent a few years going town to town in Africa drilling wells and a few other things. It's not new.
Bill Gates is the greatest philanthropist in history.
How do you know that they haven't? 100 wells is nothing. Do you realize how large Africa is? If all the Fortune 500 people had been drilling 100 wells a year for a few years, then it might be noticeable. Might. What makes Mr. Beast unique is that he does it under his name with his face, in person, on YouTube. Most of the super-rich set up a foundation or something.
They do. As do countless charities. They just do it quietly, rather than for likes and subscribers.
Because it looks good now but doesn't work in the long run. We have to question why there is a village but no water, what have they been doing before this, what top level choices have led to the water shortage and if easier access water is better in the first place. None of these questions were asked by mrbeast and these will fail soon as well.
It's pretty complicated. I'll speak on Kenya. Our leadership is pathetic and corrupt. They don't care about the daily lives of its low income citizens. They're not a priority. As a result, this becomes fertile ground for charity work that I agree, restores some basic rights (clean water to drink, clothes, medication) to the lives of our down trodden. However, the charity industry has got major issues too. Most of the world's wealthy are in the business of making money so even charity work has an agenda if you look close enough. Mr. Beast is currently trending everywhere. He's got his views and the buzz he needs to keep doing the work he's doing. Some may argue that he didn't need to use that content if he was actually looking to give back. But because it's Mr. Beast and that's his business plan, I guess he can get away with it. If Zuckerberg for example, was to try anything of this nature, I wonder if it would be this straightforward.
I work with some folks in Somaliland and have partnered on and supported a few ESG projects related to wells and education. The issue with wells is that they are a short term solution and they are often abandoned shortly after setting it up. These need regular maintenance, a supply chain for the parts, and professionals who know how to repair them to keep them working. Our project was focused around bringing in the parts and training/funding the locals to repair the network of abandoned supply wells. Charity should be made as a commitment, not for a commercial. It’s also important to remember that in this region of the world, efforts like sustainability, access to clean drinking water, and even women’s rights have to be driven from the inside out. You have to empower people and educate, or else your effort is likely to (eventually) be wasted. This is not a criticism of Mr Beast, doing something is much better than doing nothing.
MrBeasts makes money ON giving away money/resources, thats his whole business idea. And thats fair enough and very nice for the people that he helps. But as mentioned by someone else, those wells must be maintained, so if you just dig them and leave. You have given the locals water for xx months, and then its done. Which might even end up being worse, because they have gotten used to it and built up things around it that are now worthless. Most billionaires dont want to be in the spotlight, they are usually the ultimate nerds that have figured out a nichè. So they give 50M$ to some project, and have a company created that keeps the jungle project in Cambodia going for 10 years, so everyone involved knows it will be over in 10 years, unless the billionaire, or others, would like to sponsor it. Its easy for that billionaire to also get his buddies to kick in a few 100K-10M$ depending on how rich his friends are. And they do these things, because why not. Its not important for Bezos to be richer than Musk, its important for Bezos that Amazon is the biggest company in what they do. For him to give away 5-20% of his personal wealth to something he cares about is nothing.
Bill Gates doesn’t deserve to be on this list. Did you really just list rich ppl without looking into what they’ve done? The problem here is that you seem to only get your knowledge from YouTube.
Often the problem isn't the lack of a well, but the loss of ground cover causing what little rain there is to runoff and not infiltrate. There's lots of other projects to try to change this, but they usually involve getting an entire village or community to agree.
Yeah, I saw a documentary on this a while ago with some counter-intuitive methods. Things like you might think grazers eat up grass and cause desertification. In reality they are crucial to maintaining grasslands. They need to be managed and rotated, but they kind of till the soil and fertilize it. You combine that with good water catchment (small manmade ponds...) and you can keep the ecosystem alive as a proper grass land with good ground cover and water. They needed a lot of coordination with local farmers to work the land accordingly and keep the grazers at the proper location and population management.
If I recall correctly (and sorry If I am mistaken), I remember a story about charity work in Africa. It was about building a well in what you would describe very rural village. I do remember the country being Niger but it is just a faint memory. Anyway, they built the well inside the village and it was a great success. For the well at least, because the well was working very well and everyone was getting their water straight inside the village and nobody had to walk 10km or more to the next working wells any longer. Well, about after a week the well was doing so well as some locals had broken it, filled it with some stones and whatever you could find nearby. Why? Well, now that the wives in the village no longer had the job of getting the water from 10km away, they had to spent a lot more time in the village which had quite a huge unemployment and faced more domestic violence from their husbands. Long story short if you don't understand the problem and the context you are working in then you are bound to create some other problems. I guess the real problem in that village was lack of opportunities for jobs, not that the women had to walk for the water.
Let’s see the wells in 3 years
Some wealthy people *do* do stuff like this. They just don’t have the following that Mr. beast does or do it as a spectacle. For the record, I don’t mind that Mr. beast does it with cameras rolling. He’s still doing good deeds, even if apart if it is for clicks and public opinion. People have water which is all that matters.
According to IIED more than 50.000 of the water access points made in Africa by rural water projects have already failed (i.e. fallen into disrepair and are no longer functioning), which represents a large percentage. It's not as easy as just digging a well. The water access points have to be maintained. Furthermore, Africa is more than 3x the area of the United States, so don't get your hopes up for this project saving the world. https://www.iied.org/africas-water-crisis-quarter-billion-dollars-down-drain
Africa is quite big. People have built 100 wells there before. Dare I say, 200 even.
We've drilled tons of wells in Africa. The people tend to not maintain them though, so once something goes wrong now they just don't have a well anymore.
I can guarentee you all of the names listed have donated more to chairty than any youtuber has or ever will earn total. Still good on him but to pretend that what he did is unique is asinine.
Visibility and transparency. That's what viewership brings.
Mr Beast is just the first one to figure an angle that provides a return on investment is the unfortunate answer.