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Chocolate, Classrooms, and Clean Water: What MrBeast Is Building in Africa

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Ancient Greek red-figure painting of Achilles bandaging the wounded Patroclus, with the title Chocolate, Classrooms & Clean Water

I’ll admit it: I first knew MrBeast as the guy giving away absurd amounts of money on YouTube. But the more I read about what Jimmy Donaldson and his team have been doing in Africa — wells, classrooms, school lunches — the more curious I got. Not just about what they built, but how it gets paid for. Because there’s a chocolate bar in the middle of this story.

So I spent some time digging through news reports, Beast Philanthropy’s own materials, and the videos themselves. Here’s what I found, the good and the complicated.

Feastables: the chocolate engine

Donaldson started Feastables in 2021 with Jim Murray, former president of RXBAR, according to Bloomberg reporting republished by Fortune. The bars were first sold only at Walmart and have since expanded into Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The business side is striking. Documents shown to investors, reported in March 2025, put Feastables at about $250 million in sales in 2024 and more than $20 million in profit. Over the same period, his media business (the YouTube channel and the Prime Video show Beast Games) brought in similar revenue but lost almost $80 million. In other words, the chocolate makes money; the videos, for now, cost money. The Verge reported that Beast Industries projected Feastables revenue of $520 million for 2025.

It’s worth being precise here: I couldn’t find a public source saying a fixed share of Feastables profit goes to charity. The connection is different, and in some ways more interesting. Feastables says it buys 100% of its cocoa on Fairtrade terms, pays farmers the Fairtrade Living Income Reference Price (or the market price, whichever is higher), and works only with farms and co-ops that run child labor monitoring and remediation systems. Its stated mission is to “end child labor in the cocoa industry.” That goal is exactly where the school-building work in Ghana picks up.

How Beast Philanthropy is funded

Beast Philanthropy is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit, launched in 2020 with its own YouTube channel. When it started, the AP reported the channel donated 100% of its advertising revenue, brand deals, and merchandise sales. Today the charity describes the model simply: every video funds a real-world project, and the channel’s revenue goes to the charity, working directly and through established partners on the ground.

Its public tax filings (via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, as compiled by Beast Explained) show roughly $10.2 million in revenue in 2022, $9.5 million in 2023, and $8.5 million in 2024, with about $8.8 million spent that year.

100 wells across Africa

The project that put Beast Philanthropy on the map in Africa was the “I Built 100 Wells In Africa” video, published in November 2023. According to CNN, Donaldson said the wells would provide clean drinking water for up to 500,000 people in Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Kenya’s Citizen Digital reports that more than 50 of the wells were in Kenya, including one serving a school in Nairiri, Meru County.

The same video showed his team donating school supplies in Kenya — furniture, soccer balls, computers, whiteboards, projectors — building a bridge so a village could safely reach its schools and hospital, and giving bikes to children in Zimbabwe so they could get to school.

Building schools: Ghana and Kenya

In February 2026, MrBeast released “I Built 10 Schools Around The World.” Ghanaian outlet Modern Ghana reports that the ten schools span countries including Ghana, Mexico, India, and the USA.

The Ghana section is the heart of the video. The team tore down a school building that, Donaldson says, government officials had ordered demolished, and replaced it. At another school they refurbished classrooms for more than 250 children and added two new classrooms. They built housing for two teachers, drilled a well for the school and surrounding community, added bathrooms, sinks, and a kitchen, and committed to a free school lunch every school day for five years. In the video he credits the Rockefeller Foundation for helping and says he built schools in eleven communities in Ghana. Modern Ghana reports the project was a roughly $1 million investment and that the community honored him with the title “Chief of Development.”

Here’s where the chocolate comes back in. In that same video, Donaldson ties the schools directly to Feastables’ cocoa policy, saying that providing a safe school means kids aren’t forced into child labor.

Kenya got a school too. Citizen Digital reports that in February 2026 the team built ten new classrooms at Nyakichiwa Primary School in Bomet County, where a school lunch program had started the year before, and that Donaldson said attendance rose at least 10%. The outlet describes it as one of ten schools in Africa he has supported. In April 2025, at Oloirien Primary School in Narok, the team added desks, a larger kitchen, a well, a greenhouse, and a farm.

The work is continuing. In September 2026, Beast Philanthropy and the Rockefeller Foundation announced a partnership on community-led school meal programs in Ghana’s Eastern Region and Kenya’s Bomet County, noting that Beast Philanthropy had built six schools in the previous twelve months.

The criticism, fairly stated

Not everyone cheered, and I think the criticism deserves a real hearing.

When the wells video came out, CNN reported that some Kenyan activists and journalists used it to call out their own government. Activist Boniface Mwangi contrasted it with car grants for lawmakers; journalist Ferdinand Omondi called it “embarrassing” that a YouTuber did work “our taxes should have completed ages ago.” Others, like aspiring politician Francis Gaitho, argued it reinforced a stereotype of Africa as dependent on handouts. More broadly, some critics have accused Donaldson of exploiting vulnerable people for views.

The sharpest practical point came from Saran Kaba Jones, founder of FACE Africa, who told CNN that “the issue is sustainability” — in areas where her group works, she said, 60% of wells are broken because there’s no plan for maintenance.

That question resurfaced in 2025, when online commentators claimed the wells had failed. In response, Beast Philanthropy posted an August 2025 update saying all the water projects were “fully operational,” and Donaldson said he sent someone to every well to film it still working more than a year later, according to Newsweek. Whatever you think of the spectacle, publishing proof is a good habit.

What I’m taking from this

I don’t think you have to love every thumbnail to see something worth learning here. The lesson I keep coming back to is simple: when what you sell is connected to the good you want to do, the giving stops being an afterthought. Feastables’ cocoa sourcing and the Ghana schools are part of the same story. And when people questioned the results, the answer was to go back and show the receipts.

I run a small art and apparel shop, not a chocolate empire. But that idea — let every sale carry a little good with it, and be transparent enough that anyone can check — is one I’ve been thinking about a lot for Inner Vision Artworks. Giving back is something I want to build into how we work, and when we do, I’ll share the details and the proof right here on the blog. Small, honest, and visible beats big and vague.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what you think — about MrBeast, about creator philanthropy, or about how a small business can do real good.

— Christoph

Sources

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