A few days ago, MrBeast, the most popular content creator of Youtube, with well over 200 million subscribers, published a video in which he and his team build 100 wells that will provide clean water for about 500 THOUSAND people. Not only he did that, but all the ad money generated by the video goes to help those communities as well. If that weren’t enough to change the life of thousands of people, they also gave children soccer balls and bikes, gave schools white boards, projectors, and computers, built a bridge to help a community be able to safely reach local schools and hospitals, etc.
Check it out if you haven’t yet:
But as they say, “no good deed goes unpunished”.
Haters
You might not believe it, but yes. After all that, and more(this is not a one-off thing, MrBeast has a whole secondary channel where he does this kind of thing often, has all videos as fundraiser and a whole website dedicated to donating and support projects like this), some people still aren’t satisfied.
Yep. According to MrActualGoodGuy above, MrBeast is a terrible person who “makes money off of 3rd world countries”(you know, by spending his own to help those). After all if their Minister of Culture was serious, he or she would censor any show of poverty in their country for the rest of the world, making people believe everything is fine, right?
However, what MrActualGoodGuy fails to ever talk about is… what has he done? Other than shit talk online that is. I tried looking on the internet, his twitter included, to find anything but haven’t seen any action just barking.
Africa’s situation
Now, let’s address the topic of Africa, as a continent. Briefly speaking, Africa, much like the Americas, had it’s own natives and got colonized and explored by europeans for centuries. Differently from the Americas however, when it got split into multiple countries and gained independence, many enemy tribes got forced together, which generates conflicts to this day, and a number of other things happened.
Now back to the critics, our MrActualGoodGuy pointed out that the video perpetuates stereotypes that Africa is “dependent on handouts…and philanthropic intervention,”… but the thing is… many africans ARE dependent on philanthropic intervention. As of 2020, about 470 MILLION africans were below the poverty line, that’s about 35% of the population receiving under 2 dollars a DAY. The continent has the highest poverty rates globally with 23 of the 28 world’s poorest countries, and no way to fix that anytime soon since sub-saharan Africa(basically the middle and south parts) has some of the most corrupt and violent countries in the world, which will slow any effort for political and social improvement for at least the next few decades.
So while yes, MrBeast didn’t save Africa, nor is he able to, the work he and other’s do are the only thing keeping millions of people alive, while their own government, many times, steals from and abuses them. Whether or not Jimmy does what he does out of genuine desire to help doesn’t matter, what matters is that work like that changes things, even if a little, even if for the views, for the better. He doesn’t ask neither money nor anything in return.
Charities, like “Save the Children” and “International Medical Corps” for example, operates in multiple places, including United States and Europe, so the argument that orgs just “makes money off of 3rd world countries” falls flat here. They’re people trying to help people until political, economical and societal changes happens, so they won’t external need it anymore.
In a world where thousands die every day, due to lack of clean water and food, complaining on twitter helps no one. Actions do.
