Philanthropy

I'd had a note to look up Pakistani charitable giving, and that led to World Giving Report, where the map claims that China is in the top 20%! That seemed less than believable, but apparently there've been some changes made recently. Charities Aid Foundation put them at 95'th out of 142, up from about the bottom. "corporate philanthropy, which makes up the bulk of Chinese charitable giving, in contrast with Europe and North America where individual giving dominates." The WGR report has numbers that don't quite match the CAF numbers, albeit for different years, and since I gather that the statistics are compiled by the government and given largely to government-approved projects, I'm guessing that the China numbers may be inflated and that since even they say 76% of the donations are corporate, that these are often a kind of informal tax.

But it is very interesting that a) the Chinese see benefits in charity which they didn't a few years ago or b) the Chinese government sees benefits in appearing to be charitable. Or perhaps both.

Hmm. I'm not fond of jello numbers. Alliance says 73% of Pakistanis donate money and 16% volunteer while 42% say "they are unable to donate to charitable causes due to financial constraints." Maybe they give to their neighbors (as required by Islam) and don't consider that "charitable cause." The WGR says 51% give directly.

The WGR says 61% of the US population donate and 28% volunteer, and only 28% give directly to people in need. Nigeria has 89% donating, 69% doing so directly, and has 76% volunteering.

The "UK ranked 64th most generous country".

I'm not sure where the data for all this comes from, and what the denominators are (in Nigeria they use "working age people" for the volunteering rate), so I suspect some fuzziness and some apples to pears comparisons. But at some level, in most places, people are helping neighbors and even strangers.

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Why Pakistan? It considers itself the "land of the pure", devoted to Islam; and one of the pillars of Islam is Zakat: alms giving. Apparently they take it fairly seriously: 1.64% of income (.75% directly) vs 0.97% (.26% directly) in the US.

Overhead

CharityWatch keeps track of the relative overhead of charities: how much of the money they get goes into salaries and advertising and whatnot. Low fractions are good, high fractions warn of scams. Something like UMCOR had 3%, while BLM Global Network had 53% overhead (and poor governance and transparency).

They don't rate USAID. I wonder how much money turns into actual assistance.

To be fair, it's not clear that was ever exactly USAID's purpose. Before the current revelations I assumed that part of its grants went into direct aid programs, and part to development infrastructure (physical and legal) schemes, from which the local elite skimmed what they pleased--an unofficial bribery. (Oh, and apparently trying to overthrow the occasional government. I'm not saying that is never in the US interest.) Evidently the administrators thought that the USA also needed aid in developing in their favorite directions. I suspect that the net overhead--combining that at USAID and at the NGOs they funded--was extremely high, but I haven't yet seen numbers.

Relatedly, I read a claim that north of 90% of money for aiding Haiti stayed in the USA. I don't know where they got that number, nor exactly what it means: Did it include buying products here and shipping them there? Just sending money to Haiti--you might as well make the process efficient and put it in Swiss bank accounts directly.

Even when the parties are honest and dedicated, the overhead involved in keeping track of how a grant's money is used and the associated paperwork for grants can be noticeable -- so there's going to be some waste. The more diverse the programs which the entity funds, the greater the waste must be, since you need administrators knowledgeable about and able to detect shenanigans with reports about a variety of different things: not just orphanages and well projects.