Growing giving: Charity fundraising in Tanzania

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The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) produces an annual World Giving Index, documenting which nations’ populations give away the most money, volunteer and undertake other charitable activities. While the report gives a broad overview of the global picture, the challenge for CAF is how to understand what is happening on the ground, particularly in countries that are less rich and globally connected.

As part of this goal, CAF employed Ipsos Mori to research the attitudes to charities and charitable giving in Tanzania, with the support of the Aga Khan Foundation, CS Mott Foundation and the UK National Lottery Community Fund. The project examined individual giving, the likely impact of the expansion of the middle classes in the developing world on charitable giving, and the context in which charities operated, such as government regulations, in Tanzania, as part of a series of similar projects in South Africa, Uganda and Kenya.

Sameera Mehra, head of global alliance and international networks at CAF, says that the reason for examining charitable giving was to gauge the strength of civil society in Tanzania, both financially and within society. “We see civil society and charitable giving as two sides of the same coin, and they are quite interconnected,” she explains. “We were looking at how models have worked in certain countries, and how we identify where we could be partnering with local organisations to grow giving.”

The researchers conducted desk research on the policies and enabling environment in Tanzania. Informal interviews then took place with local and regional policy experts, followed by 10 qualitative interviews with local and national civil society organisations, including a mix of small, medium and large organisations, some in cities and some rural, and across a range of causes.

The researchers conducted a focus group with middle-class people, determined using a screening tool based on a 2018 Ipsos study on Africa’s rising middle class, and 300 quantitative interviews also took place in the Tanzanian cities of Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Mwanza. Finally, two cross-sector workshops investigated the findings, one with development professionals in London and the other with 60 people from local organisations held in Nairobi, Kenya.

The research found that the average middle-class Tanzanian gave away 24% of their monthly income, much of it through unofficial routes such as helping family, friends and the local community. “A lot is happening informally, and takes very different forms, such as in-kind donations, volunteering and time,” says Mehra. “During Covid-19, it became an informal welfare system, like a safety net.

“A lot of giving is what we call informal – it is giving to family, extended family and community. We sometimes miss capturing that. We wanted to get a robust and deep understanding of what already exists.”

The results have helped inform recommendations for government, funders and charities to strengthen the charity sector in Tanzania. A big issue raised is trust in and legitimacy of civil society organisations, a problem highlighted in the past year – for example, the Tanzanian government has cracked down on organisations helping with Covid-19, as it denies it is a problem in the country and has been trying to suppress organisations examining the extent of the issue. There is a lack of understanding of how civil society works and funding it needs, says Mehra, and networks are required to make it easier for donors to give, and for charities to access these funds.

Mehra says the next step is to get more flexible funding into Tanzania, including covering core costs via infrastructure bodies that help provide the “backbone” of the charity sector and create the right funding environment. Work is ongoing to increase awareness of tax incentives for charities in the country – “one part is creating awareness that they exist, and the other part is making them easy to access,” explains Mehra.

With civil society still in a vulnerable place in Tanzania, Mehra is aware there is a long road ahead to put the right policies in place: “The challenge now is what is going to stick, and what we need to do to make it stick.”

• CAF estimates that 2.4 billion people worldwide could join the middle classes by 2030
• If all those 2.4 billion donated 0.5% of their spending, $319bn would be raised annually
• Poverty rates in Tanzania have fallen from 64% in 2015 to 47.4% in 2017.

Source: ‘Growing Giving in Tanzania’ report, CAF, 2020

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE OF IMPACT.