Technology 4 min read By Callum Montgomery
MrBeast spends $10m building Ghanaian village to fight child labour
YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, has completed an eight-month, $10 million project to build a village in Ghana, including homes, a school and a farm, as part of a wider push to eradicate child labour.
YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has spent $10 million building a village in Ghana, complete with houses, a school, toilet facilities, a marketplace, a community farm and a well. The project, named Abna Dakwa, took eight months to complete and also included drainage improvements around the existing settlement to prevent flooding.
Donaldson, 28, who has the largest subscriber count on YouTube and a reported net worth of $2.6 billion, said the aim is to keep families and children out of illegal labour. The scheme offers free school meals to pupils at the newly built school for five years, in the hope that children and their families will stay in education rather than entering illegal work.
The creator wrote on social media platform X that his 14-year career on YouTube had been leading up to the humanitarian project. But he acknowledged that his audience may not engage as enthusiastically with philanthropic content compared with his light-hearted and dramatic videos, which have included titles such as «Escape 100 cops, win $500,000» and «7 days stranded on an island».
«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,» Donaldson wrote ahead of the video’s release. When a follower pointed out that his humanitarian videos tend to attract fewer views, he doubled down. «It’s funny when people say I only help people for views because it’s literally the opposite lol,» he replied. «Doesn’t matter though, helping people brings me purpose, and even if no one watches, I’ll keep making them.»
The project is part of a wider goal by Donaldson’s Beast Philanthropy non-profit, which aims to eradicate child labour in Ghana. Other targets include bringing clean water to millions of people, delivering more than 48 million meals to those who are food insecure, and planting more than 25 million trees.
Donaldson’s core viewership skews heavily toward ages 11 to 24, with the strongest concentration among middle schoolers through younger university students. By contrast, the average age of a philanthropist in the United States is 64, according to the National Philanthropic Trust. That generational gap may help explain why his philanthropic output does not always match the engagement of his entertainment videos.
However, Donaldson’s commitment to similar projects echoes trends observed among the children of wealthy families. Katherine Lorenz, who leads the Next Gen group at Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, recently said that young heirs are pushing their parents to give away cash more quickly. «I see more younger generation folks pushing on their parents to give more,» Lorenz said. «They’re saying, ‘You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away and to give it away faster.’»
One user questioned why Donaldson was not doing more for Greenville, North Carolina, where the creator grew up and now has his operational headquarters. The entrepreneur replied on X: «If I listed all the philanthropic things we do locally I literally wouldn’t be able to fit it in this tweet.»
The Ghana village project represents a significant escalation in the scale of creator-led philanthropy, blending online entertainment with long-term development work. While the video may not generate the same viewing figures as his stunts, Donaldson has signalled that he intends to continue funding and producing such projects regardless of their commercial performance.
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