Insight1 min read
Four questions for the next generation of African funders
Notes from a roundtable with practitioners from Kampala, Nairobi and Accra.
When a national statistics office asks a household whether it gave to charity last year, the question carries an assumption: that giving passes through an organisation. In most of Eastern Africa it does not. It passes directly — to a cousin’s school fees, to a neighbour’s hospital bill, to the collection at a burial.
The consequence is not a rounding error. Our fieldwork across 1,400 households suggests formal instruments capture under a third of what people actually give. Policy built on that figure treats African societies as low-giving when they are, by most measures, the opposite.
A different instrument
The alternative is not more precision in the same question. It is a module that starts from relationships rather than institutions, and asks about transfers by occasion — illness, death, school terms, harvest — the moments when obligation actually activates.