Spent £100, gave £50,000

Would you spend one hundred pounds in order to give someone else £50,000?

The Gamebia project, as it is now known, has costs and benefits.

• The costs are to me, and once I have completed all tasks, the costs are going to be between £0 and £100.
• The benefits are to an individual/ family in the Gambia, and will be the equivalent in local money of between 5 months and 4 years of the average Gambian wage.  We worked out how much this would be for one modest person in the UK, and this worked out at £50k.

The reason for the disparity is as follows:

• The person I am doing this for may decide to sell some of the equipment I am salvaging and keep only the laptop, which will yield about 5 months of local wages at the value of the equipment before I fixed it.  It means that the postage was a bit pointless, but if this is what he has to do to survive, this is fair enough.  I am not doing this to control anybody.

• Assuming that I manage to fix as many machines as possible, the repaired value is 4 years of Gambian average wage, again quite a lot, but how many local people can afford this?

• In the event that he decides to use the equipment to get other people used to computers and working, it will mean that he can use sites like fiverr, clickworker, youtube and hubpages to establish a presence online and create some passive income – income derived from work done once, and viewed many times.  It also means he can be supported towards the ultimate aim of the project, which is to create a small gaming company producing visual novels, which are not all that cost effective to produce for most people here, but would make a very good income there. This makes the potential value of the project, provided that he puts the time in, which I believe he will, limitless.  I reckon it will take a full year of fairly intensive work to get to the point of handing over control of new projects.  In the meantime, I will have a team of people who can use work I can provide to train and earn at the same time, which seems to me to be mutually beneficial as I will be able to make a lot more novels in a short space of time.  In addition to this I get to learn how to fix a host of new machines I would not otherwise have looked at.

So, all in all I believe this to be a worthwhile way of spending some time.  My friend was wondering why on earth I would do it, and I think my friend in the Gambia was wondering if he was a ‘bumster,’ which I believe is a local term for gigolo.  Not at all, I just thought limitless was a lot better than 5 months wages.

As a caring person who believes strongly in the value of opportunity, and as someone who gets by on almost nothing as a rule, I think I am spending my time wisely.

So, tell me, would you spend £0-100 on giving someone else £50,000?