You don't need to be rich to save a life: how ₦2,000 or ₦5,000 goes further than you think

You don't need to be rich to save a life: how ₦2,000 or ₦5,000 goes further than you think

Most people who don't give to us are not cold. They have simply run a quick sum in their head. My ₦2,000, next to a hospital bill. And they decide that sending it would be almost embarrassing, so they close the tab.

We understand that instinct. We also think it is wrong, and we want to show you why.

What ₦180,000 sounded like to a father

We recently told a father how much had come in toward his child's care. He went quiet for a moment, then said the money was a whole lot.

The figure was ₦180,000.

Sit with the distance between those two things. If you spend your days looking at treatment costs, ₦180,000 is a part-payment, a deposit, a number on a form. If you are the man who has spent months asking relatives for help and running out of relatives, it is the first morning in a long time that the next step is actually possible.

That gap is the whole reason this post exists. The person who gives rarely knows what their money sounds like on the other end.

The arithmetic nobody does

₦180,000 is what ninety people giving ₦2,000 looks like.

It is also thirty-six people giving ₦5,000. Or some messy combination of both, which is usually how it actually happens: a few larger gifts, and a long tail of people who sent what they could spare that week and assumed it would not register.

None of those people were rich. That is the point. Not one of them could have covered a child's treatment alone, and it would have been reasonable for any one of them to look at the total and conclude their contribution was pointless. If ninety people had reasoned that way, the father would still be waiting.

Why small gifts do more here than elsewhere

We do not fundraise into a bottomless pot. Every child on our site has a specific figure attached, for a specific treatment, and the case closes when that figure is reached.

So your ₦2,000 is not disappearing into general operations. It moves a real number on a real page, for a child whose name you can read. When a case is funded, we stop collecting for it and move to the next one.

Being honest about the limits: ₦2,000 will not pay for a surgery. It pays for a portion of something. [Team: insert two or three real line items and current costs here, e.g. what a set of tests, a course of medication, or a night on the ward actually costs on a live case. Use figures we can defend.]

There is also something that does not show up on a ledger. Families in this position often carry a quiet conviction that no one outside their household cares whether their child lives. A stranger sending ₦2,000 says otherwise. We have watched that land, and it is not nothing.

If you have been meaning to

Pick a child. Send what you would spend on lunch. Then, if you are able, do it again next month.

Ninety people doing that is a funded case. You will not know which one of the ninety you are, and it does not matter.