YouTuber MrBeast has revealed the completion of a $10 million village in Ghana, featuring homes, a school, toilet facilities, a marketplace, a community farm and a well.
The project, named Abna Dakwa, also included drainage improvements around the existing settlement to help prevent flooding. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said it had taken eight months to complete.
The 28-year-old said the initiative was intended to help keep families and children out of illegal labour. It forms part of the work of his Beast Philanthropy non-profit, which aims to eradicate child labour in Ghana.
The newly built school will provide pupils with free meals for five years, in the hope that children and their families will be encouraged to remain in education rather than entering work.
MrBeast’s philanthropic work
Beast Philanthropy has also set goals of bringing clean water to millions of people, delivering more than 48 million meals to people facing food insecurity and planting more than 25 million trees.
Donaldson, who is reportedly worth $2.6 billion, acknowledged before releasing the video that his charitable work might attract less attention than his more dramatic online content.
“It prob won’t perform that well, but it’s something I care a lot about and I hope my passion for it shines through,” he wrote on X.
When a follower said his humanitarian videos tended to receive fewer views, Donaldson replied: “It’s funny when people say I only help people for views because it’s literally the opposite lol. Doesn’t matter though, helping people brings me purpose, and even if no one watches, I’ll keep making them.”
Donaldson has the largest subscriber count on YouTube, with a core audience concentrated among people aged 11 to 24. The strongest group is reported to be middle school pupils through to younger university students, while the average philanthropist in the United States is 64.
His plans for further projects reflect a wider interest among younger people from wealthy families in accelerating charitable giving. Katherine Lorenz, who leads the Next Gen group at Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, said younger family members were increasingly urging their parents to donate more quickly.
“I see more younger generation folks pushing on their parents to give more,” Lorenz said. “You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away and to give it away faster.”
After one user questioned why Donaldson was not doing more in Greenville, North Carolina, where he grew up and has his operational headquarters, he responded: “If I listed all the philanthropic things we do locally I literally wouldn’t be able to fit it in this tweet.”
