‘Tis the Season Part 2: Giving Around the World
Note: This is Part 2 of a series looking at some of the issues we talk about most often at the end of the calendar year and the middle of the holiday season. You can read Part 1 here.
‘Tis the season… for Top 10 Lists.
Here’s one you haven’t seen: the top 10 nations for “giving.” Each year, a group called the Charities Aid Foundation conducts a massive survey of 145,000 people in 142 countries.
The Good Samaritan helped a stranger. Which nation has the greatest number of Good Samaritans? (Image from Van Gogh’s “Good Samaritan,” 1890)
The Foundation asks people three things about their behavior in the past month: 1) Have you donated money to a charity?; 2) Have you helped a stranger or someone you didn’t know who needed help?; and 3) Have you volunteered your time to an organization?
Then they crunch the results and come up with a “World Giving Index,” a ranking of those 142 countries, top to bottom.
OK now: before you look, do your own mental checklist of which countries you think score highest on those measures (I’m leaving a little space below so you can take a clean guess)
Here’s this year’s Top 10:
1. Indonesia
2. Kenya
3. Singapore
4. The Gambia
5. Nigeria
6. United States
7. Ukraine
8. Australia
9. United Arab Emirates
10. Malta
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wouldn’t have been this list. It’s worth trying to sort through.
Which factors don’t appear to have much to do with national generosity?
· Do the countries need to be wealthy? Apparently not. There are rich (the US and Indonesia are among the world’s wealthiest) and poor countries (the Gambia is one of the poorest) on the list.
· Do “western” or “Judeo-Christian” values make a difference? Not according to this list. The top 10 includes just one western hemisphere nation (US) and three Judeo-Christian majority countries (US, Ukraine and Australia).
· Do countries need to be economically or politically stable to be generous? Nope. If so, Ukraine (war) surely wouldn’t be in the top 10 and Morocco (earthquakes) and Greece (economics) wouldn’t have had the biggest one year increases of all countries.
Which factors do appear to have something to do with it?
· Cultural traditions may matter: Eight of the ten nations most likely to help a stranger are in Africa, topped by Kenya, where 82% of people surveyed report helping someone they didn’t know in the past month (in the US it was 76%). The World Giving Index attributes this openness to a pan-African tradition of “ubuntu,” described as the capacity “to express compassion, reciprocity, dignity, humanity and mutuality in the interests of building and maintaining communities with justice and mutual caring.” At the opposite extreme are countries with more historic distrust of strangers: just 24% of Japanese and 23% of Poles report helping a stranger in the past month.
Giving to charity, or zakat, is one of the five pillars of Islam, but nowhere is it more emphasized than in Indonesia.
· Religious emphasis may matter: Indonesia has made dramatic progress in its generosity since the poll was inaugurated and currently ranks number 1 in charitable giving, number 1 in volunteerism (it has been number 1 overall for the past seven years)
. The most common reason cited for the success of Indonesia is that its people overwhelmingly follow Muslim traditions of zakat, infaq/shadaqua and waqf, all associated with service and donations to underprivileged people through the provision of donations. A raft of government-based and independent “zakat” organizations make it so easy to give that 90% of Indonesians report giving in the past month (this compares to 61% in the US). Ranking lowest are countries like Georgia and Botswana with weaker religious traditions. In both countries, only 6% of adults donate to charities.
· Governments can provide a nudge: Indonesia’s emphasis on government-assisted collection of zakat is one example. But the biggest move up this year came after Singapore’s government enacted a series of measures that have resulted in more volunteering, increased help to strangers and more charitable giving. A “Corporate Volunteer Scheme” has made it easier for corporate volunteers to volunteer time for charity and a new tax credit permitting individuals to reduce their tax burden by $2.50 for every $1 they give has increased charitable giving by 45%. Tony Soh, the CEO of a group called the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Center, says the country will continue to push to “bring the public, private and people sectors together to nurture a culture of giving, where every tradition, large or small, brings us closer to our vision of Singapore as a City of Good.”
What can the US learn from this Index?
It can be tricky to “move up” in a lot of world ranking scales. This past year, for example, the US ranked #49 among nations in life expectancy, #58 globally in perceived racial equity, #63 in affordability; #74 in the amount of bureaucracy and #78 in manufacturing costs. Improving all those rankings could take generations. But look what’s happened with the World Giving Index over the past few years — you can move up or down relatively quickly. As recently as 2019, the US ranked #1. In 2013, Ukraine ranked #102, Singapore #64, Kenya #33 and Indonesia #17.
That suggests that intentional initiatives by our religious institutions, our clubs and civic organizations or our government could all have a meaningful impact on improving our ranking in a relatively short period of time.
Every bit of improvement would mean a better life for those who benefited from our generosity. And do we really believe anyone would stand up to fight the effort? So who’s ready for generosity to go viral?
· Which organizational leader could step forward to show us how to be more helpful to strangers (we rank #12 worldwide)?
· Who will make the case that we should give more to charity (we rank #13 worldwide)?
· Who’ll take up the mantle to make it easy and cool for more of us to volunteer (we’re #15)?
At a time when many of our communities of faith have retreated to enclaves, our civic clubs are waning and our politics could hardly be more divided, a generosity initiative may be exactly what the doctor should order to heal us.
Notes:
2024 World Giving Index report: https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/inside-giving/wgi/wgi_2024_report.pdf
Ubuntu definition and analysis (see p. 15): https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-publications/caf_wgi_10th_edition_report_2712a_web_101019.pdf
Indonesian giving analysis: http://www.gbmrjournal.com/pdf/v16n2s/V16N2s-3.pdf
US Church giving data: https://www.nucleus.church/blog/church-giving-statistics
Some of the US world rankings on the perception index: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-09-18/how-the-u-s-performed-in-the-2023-best-countries-rankings
US life expectancy ranking: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/
Sp