Why philanthropy data in Africa keeps undercounting

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.