WHAT IS THE WORLD GIVING INDEX?
CAF has been producing its World Giving Index for more than a decade. The first CAF World Giving Index was published in the wake of the global financial crisis, and now this long-running study has given us the opportunity to look at how a new global crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic – has impacted giving around the world.
The study provides combined insight into the scope and nature of giving around the world and looks at three aspects of giving behaviour and asks: Have you done any of the following in the past month?
- Helped a stranger, or someone you didn’t know who needed help?
- Donated money to a charity?
- Volunteered your time to an organisation?
The significance and importance of the ability to act across borders has become more apparent than ever during the Covid-19 pandemic, as societies and communities around the world have found themselves in need of support or in a position to offer it to others.
“More than three in ten adults around the world donated money to charity in 2020”
KEY FINDINGS
The extraordinary events of past year have reinforced the importance of civil society and international collaboration. The CAF World Giving Index offers a unique glimpse of global trends in generosity:
- The Top 10 most generous countries has changed substantially in 2020
- The most generous country in the world is Indonesia
- More than three billion people helped someone they didn’t know in 2020
- Despite, or perhaps because of, the pandemic, donating money is up across the globe
“This year’s pandemic special was an eye-opening report to put together and speaks to the huge impact that Covid has had on giving across the globe – be it the surge of people who helped a stranger around the world as the crisis struck, the increasing generosity of African nations or the devastating impact of the lost opportunities to volunteer and fundraise that we are seeing in some of the world’s most generous countries. The report shows an upended Index for 2020, and we will be watching very closely to see whether or not these trends are reversed as the pandemic recedes.“
Catherine Mahoney
Research Manager
Why is this year’s report different?
The CAF World Giving Index 10th edition encompasses 10 years of interviewing – amounting to around 1.3 million interviews with people around the world. For this special 10th edition, we are including aggregate data for each country across the 10 years that interviewing was conducted, namely 2009 – 2018. Each country is given a percentage score overall for the 10 year period, and countries are ranked on the basis of these scores.
Why is there no 2019 ranking?
In 2018, Gallup made substantial changes to the location of the series of items related to charitable giving within its World Poll questionnaire, across all countries interviewed. Within the countries where interviews were conducted face to face, this change did not appear to affect the results. However, in the countries where interviews are conducted via the telephone, these changes may have had some impact. The full explanation for this impact is unknown currently but will be looked at over the next year before we publish our eleventh edition of the report. While we await further results, we have not published the data for interviews conducted in 2018 in this year’s report.
Why are some countries not included in the survey?
Gallup collects the data as part of their World Poll research programme. As such, Gallup selects the countries to be included each year. Due to the small variation in countries which Gallup includes each year, we have only included countries for which data was available for at least eight of the last ten years. This means that our report is based on 128 countries.
How are the ranking and scores calculated?
To establish a rounded measure of giving behaviour in a country, the CAF World Giving Index relies on a simple averaging of the proportions of people who answered yes to three key questions (Q. In the last month have you… Helped a stranger, or someone you didn’t know who needed help? Donated money to a charity? Volunteered your time to an organisation?). The index measures countries by proportion of population giving rather than how much they give.
Does the CAF World Giving Index take into account political and social issues?
The way the CAF World Giving Index is calculated does not take into account other factors which might drive or impede growth in generosity, such as the political, social and economic situation in any given country or region.
