The 2011 edition of the World Giving Index conducted by the Charities Aid Foundation, South Africa ranked a paltry 108 out of the 153 polled countries. CAF Southern Africa’s CEO Colleen du Toit believes that South Africa needs to develop a strong culture of “giving” and smart corporate social investment. The problem isn’t that we’re not giving, it’s that we’re doing it the wrong way. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.
In December 2011, the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation released its second annual World Giving Index, which seeks to measure the amount of philanthropy and volunteerism within the polled countries. Unsurprisingly, the index ranked the USA as the number one giving country in the world, with Ireland coming second and Australia coming in third.
“The report – which is compiled by CAF using Gallup polling information, is based on three measures. These are ‘giving money’, ‘volunteering time’ and ‘helping a stranger’. The global average of the three giving behaviours in 2011 was 32.4%, compared to 31.6% in 2010,” the organisation said.
“According to the study, the UK is the second most generous nation globally in monetary terms, with 79% of the population donating to charity each month. The highest-ranked country for ‘giving money’ is Thailand with 85% of the population having made a donation. Ireland and the Netherlands are jointly third with 75%,” CAF said.
Also unsurprisingly is that sub-Saharan Africa ranked poorly in general against other parts of the world. While South Africa ranked 108th out of 153, Madagascar came in stone-cold last.
In an interview with iMaverick, CAF Southern Africa CEO Colleen du Toit explained that this poll gave the organisation a launching pad to encourage individuals and corporations to engage in altruism. What CAF aims to do is encourage more people to channel funding – or social investment – to non-profit organisations that then help the needy.
“Our ultimate aim is to strengthen civil society. Our main work is in the corporate sector. We encourage corporations to establish corporate social investment programmes,” Du Toit said.
She said that the spirit of enabling civil society in the post-1994 administration had dissipated. These days there is very little enabling policy, though of course legislation does require all listed companies to plough 1% of their net profit into the community.
These days, companies aren’t content to just throw money at anyone who asks. Corporate social investment isn’t just about giving anymore. Companies want to see tangible benefits. But this doesn’t mean that the process need be painful for either the company or the non-profits involved, according to Du Toit. She said that her organisation specialised in trying to nudge companies in the right CSI direction. CAF will even arrange so-called employee corporate social investment, where company workers who want to volunteer their time and energy can do so through the intervention of CAF.
All the NPOs that CAF finds money and volunteers for undergo due diligence, according to Du Toit. She believes that CSI in South Africa needs to align itself to developmental goals, and needs better monitoring. “Some R4-billion is given every year through CSI,” she said. “It would be good if we could monitor and evaluate the use of this money.”
She said that she didn’t believe that the success of her programme would disincentivise people who were on the receiving end of altruism to rise to a level where they no longer needed such assistance, since her organisation focused on funnelling money to NPOs, not individuals.
Du Toit also believes that South Africa’s massive social grants economy (set up and run by the government) and the culture of foreign aid had not contributed to discouraging ordinary South Africans from being big givers. “You must remember that social grants are for individuals. The philanthropy we’re advocating for is for organisations,” she said. “I don’t think that anyone can deny that civil society does a lot in South Africa. Most of these organisations are not set up like normal businesses and cannot raise any of their own money. There is also an increased need for indigenous social investment as large amounts of foreign aid money is being withdrawn from South Africa.”
But she also warned that corporations and individuals alike need to practice the right kind of CSI to ensure that organisations that do good work, continue to receive support without creating a culture of dependency on the individuals this all ultimately benefits.
There is a different explanation for sub-Saharan Africa’s poor showing in the World Giving Index, and that’s that the type of altruism and support shown in this part of the world may not necessarily be as easy to capture in a Gallup poll. To say that the reason for this poor showing is because sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest part of the world is a simplistic analysis of how people take care of each other.
In fact, the developed economy is only just starting to get to grips with the way money flows in sub-Saharan Africa. In Dead Aid, economist and author Dambisa Moyo described the “surprise” that developed countries felt because of the enormous amounts of money that are remitted from countries like the USA and the UK to Africa, and from developed parts of the continent into the rural areas. Moyo estimated that in some countries, remittances and “under the mattress” savings equalled the dollar value of foreign aid that came in.
“On a household level, remittances are used to finance basic consumption needs: housing, children’s education, healthcare, and even capital for small businesses and entrepreneurial activities – the heart of an economy,” Moyo wrote. “More fundamentally, remittances mean more money deposited in the bank, which means more cash which the banks have to lend. In Latin America, deposits-to-GDP ratios (a key indicator of a country’s financial development) markedly improved as a result of remittances. Naturally, the most direct channel through which remittances have an impact on GDP is by increased spending in the recipients’ home.”
Which means that South Africa and the whole region would rank far better in terms of “giving” if the information capturing methods were tailored for the situation on the ground. Still, with South Africa’s income and standard of living inequality problem, a little more smart altruism by everyone who can is not a bad idea at all. DM
Read more:
- World Giving Index 2011 in CAF Southern Africa website.
Photo: REUTERS
In response to your article reporting on the results on the 2011 World Giving Index conducted by the Charities Aid Foundation, I would say that South Africans do in fact have a strong culture of giving, and in the case of some companies, have done for many decades. Further, while corporate social investment (CSI) in South Africa can indeed become smarter, as I suspect it can in every country in the world including the USA, Ireland and Canada, I don’t believe that your article properly recognised the very good work being done in this regard in South Africa.
Every research report can be questioned, the methodology attacked, the number of interviewees disputed and the results dismissed. Instead of picking at the CAF research, I’d like to offer some alternatives for your consideration.
The 2010 Barclays Wealth report entitled “Global Giving: The culture of philanthropy” indicated that the wealthy in South Africa were second only to the USA in philanthropic giving. I believe that this report surveyed individuals, not companies, but as the CAF research included individuals I thought it made an interesting comparison.
Regarding corporate giving, let’s consider the 2011 edition of Trialogue’s CSI Handbook, a guide to CSI in South Africa that is well-regarded in our “industry”. For this, the 14th edition, 148 respondents from 97 “large” South African companies were interviewed face-to-face, and their responses combined with “publically available secondary information” and Trialogue’s own databases.
They state that companies invested R6.2 billion into CSI in 2010/2011. This is quite a bit more than the R4 billion mentioned in your article. Whether this improves the impression of the private sector’s culture of giving is, of course, up for debate, but here are two more numbers that I find interesting. Again according to Trialogue, “82% of the companies surveyed allocated additional contributions over and above their CSI expenditure” and “over the past ten years CSI has outstripped inflation by 77%”.
I believe that what these figures indicate is that some local companies are contributing more to the development of South Africa than what is encouraged by legislation. And that is why I’m confused by the article’s suggestion that we need additional “enabling legislation”, presumably to reawaken that “spirit of enabling civil society”. Laws do not in themselves encourage a spirit of giving. By increasing obligation, they encourage a compliance mind-set, a spirit of resignation, and even bitterness. Let’s rather incentivise giving beyond tax exemptions and deductions, not legislate it.
You say that “These days, companies aren’t content to just throw money at anyone who asks. Corporate social investment isn’t just about giving anymore. Companies want to see tangible benefits.” This was the part of the article that really prompted me to respond. In my opinion, there is something about the tone of those few sentences that I feel is unfair to the reality of CSI in South Africa.
Very little time is required in research to get a sense of the decline of corporate giving globally, due partly to the (yes, I must say it) current economic environment and partly due to corporate philanthropy fashions and flavours, and locally because the need of disadvantaged South Africans far outstrip the resources of the private sector. I’ve had conversations with CSI colleagues from companies that are not among my clients where they describe being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications for limited funding – this is something experienced daily. Trust me, we’d love to “throw money” at anyone who asks. But we can’t. We don’t have enough.
Why shouldn’t CSI departments want to see tangible benefits? Doesn’t every department in any company need to show results? There is absolutely nothing wrong with shareholders questioning their company’s social investment because that is exactly what drives the monitoring and evaluation of CSI expenditure. “Tangible benefits” in CSI is determining whether the money spent, or invested, or given, made a difference to a disadvantaged community, whether Rands had impact. I believe that shareholders demanding “tangible benefits” results in better CSI programmes, better monitoring and evaluation, more impact and ultimately, recipients that really benefit from that money.
South Africa’s CSI “industry” is very far from perfect. We could improve it with better collaboration between CSI practitioners and grantmakers, NGO administrators, and community representatives. We could certainly talk more about what we get wrong. We could do more research into international programmes that are working. We can try harder to partner with government (believe me, this issue has complexity far beyond this comment).
But, there is also a lot that we are getting right, and I believe that your article would have been more balanced if you had reflected some of that.
Kind regards
Gina de Villiers – Senior Communications Specialist at Tshikululu Social Investments
Tshikululu Social Investments NPC manages the corporate social investment grantmaking funds and trusts of Anglo American, De Beers, the FirstRand Group, Discovery, UTi, and others. In this work of grantmaking to community development organisations in education, health and welfare across our country, we support initiatives at schools, hospices, feeding schemes, food gardens, clinics, and the like, channelling more than R2,5 billion to 16 000 public benefit projects since 1998.
I'm not quite sure how to respond, as I don't believe that you and I fundamentally disagree about South African philanthropy. I merely chose to focus on person-to-person "giving" in sub-Saharan Africa because the most likely interpretation of CAF's index would be that the people are poor and thus less likely to be altruistic.
Thanks for shedding further light on the corporate situation.
I tend to agree with Gina's balanced observations, which she substantiates with well informed industry knowledge. Many of these annual giving reports convey conflicting statistics due to varied research methodologies and samples.
I also concur that South Africa’s CSI “industry” is very far from perfect. It is an emerging profession that faces multiple challenges in a complex socio-economic landscape. But we are making inroads. Social development consultancy, GreaterCapital, have hosted Social Investment Forums since 2008, where CSI practioners are able to share learnings and gain insight from one another. Topics such as: 'Learning from Failures' are discussed at length. Insights are documented and shared in the interests of developing sound benchmarks for good practice. And in a bid to encourage more effective partnerships between corporate and government, in 2012 the forums will incorporate dialogue sessions between provincial MEC's from various key ministries and our corporate members.
These are just some of the positive measures the industry is taking to 'get it right' and to making smart, sound and strategic social investment decisions.
Kindest regards,
Roxy Mitchell - Senior CSI Consultant - GreaterCapital
Part of the GreaterGood group
I think the reality confounds the figures and this might have been a useful line of questioning on the recent census form.
I know that white South Africans are regularly criticised for not doing more for the still disadvantaged (even the PDIs who no longer are, believe they deserve a look-in), but far less is said about what black people who could, give and that would be interesting. I know that various communities are regular givers as required by church/temple law, but the recipients are often the overlooked needy within their own communities: people who've lost their jobs or children who have lost a parent.
Charity organisations could be forgiven for assuming that if they are not the direct recipients, no giving is in place, whereas working South Africans know that, even before they reach the time to make personal decisions, their tax is funding a huge, unwieldy, fraudulent, public-service system and many government social welfare payments which are also generally corrupted.