Emerging international connections of philanthropy: exploring the global and local geography of UK registered charities working overseas

Context

Overseas aid is a prominent issue, and charities play a significant role in providing overseas aid. Donations from the public to charities working overseas have grown considerably over the last thirty years. There are now around 11,000 charities, registered with the Charity Commission, that work internationally. This includes many of the well-known larger charities, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Christian Aid, but also a large number of smaller organisations - many of them quite recently formed, and many of them working in a small number of countries.

Despite the number of these charities and their significant total income, we know very little about the overall pattern of where they work overseas, and very little about the overall pattern of which parts of the UK they have links with.

Aim and research questions

Therefore, the project aims to provide a detailed overview of the charitable connections between the UK and overseas. This will be the first project of its kind.

It will have three main themes, each with a number of research questions:

1. Global patterns in charities' country of operation

Where do UK registered charities work overseas? Note that the Government provides aid, called 'Official Development Assistance (ODA)', and that it recently reviewed which countries should receive ODA. Does the country pattern of charitable operation tend to reinforce the pattern of aid provided by government, with the same countries tending to benefit from both, or do different countries tend to benefit from the two sources?

2. Overseas charitable connections of places in the UK

Are there parts of the UK that have particularly strong overseas charitable connections? And parts of the UK that have relatively few? Can strong links between particular places in the UK and particular overseas countries be identified?

3. Providing context on the overseas charitable sector

Of the 11,000 charities working overseas, how many are involved in development and relief? What roles do they play - for example, how many provide grants for projects and how many provide services? What is the distribution of income in the sector - how many very large charities are there, and how many smaller ones? How has the sector changed over the last 20-30 years: to what extent has there been a growth in the number of voluntary organisations working overseas?

The project will use publicly available data from the Charity Commission to answer these questions.

Who will this research benefit, and how?

The project will:

- be useful for charities, by providing individual charities with the information needed to place their work within the context of patterns of wider charitable activity.
- be useful for government, by providing a new understanding of the relative role of official and voluntary aid in different overseas countries.
- be relevant for members of the public who have an interest in these organisations, particularly since donations for international development have increased markedly over the last 25-30 years.

Longer-term, the project aims to provide a first solid piece of analysis in an area that is likely to become even more prominent - with aid high on the political and public agenda, and with international charities growing in size.

The research will benefit a variety of groups:

- Country-level patterns in charitable operation will benefit the voluntary sector by providing individual charities with the information needed to place their international activity within a wider context. This may form part of a suite of information which informs decisions about country priorities. Note that in the charity's latest annual report the Chair of Christian Aid, Dame Anne Owers, argued that 'Christian Aid and the wider development community have big decisions to make about where we work, and how'.

- The findings will also be relevant to government. Knowledge of patterns in overseas charitable operation will complement information on bilateral patterns in Official Development Assistance (ODA), providing a new understanding of the relative role of UK official and voluntary aid in particular countries overseas.

- Comparisons of the UK country pattern of ODA and the UK country pattern of charitable operation will feed into wider discussion within the development community about the role of philanthropy in development. Note that the recent Bellagio initiative - developed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute of Development Studies and the Resource Alliance to consider the future of philanthropy and development - concluded there was 'a lack of sufficient understanding of the different comparative advantages and complementarities between different types of actors'.

- Individual donations for international development have increased markedly over the last couple of decades. Therefore, interested members of the public may be curious to learn about the nature of the UK's international philanthropic connections - both in terms of the country patterns in operation of charities, and in terms of trends over time in the number of charities working overseas.

- Documenting the data available on patterns of country operation, and expenditure within these countries, will provide a long-term resource for data user communities spanning government, the voluntary sector and the increasing numbers of data users among the public. In particular, the project would aim to learn from, and contribute to, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which seeks to improve the access to, and quality and comparability of, data on aid, including that provided by NGOs.

- Throughout, the project would seek to promote an enduring conversation between researchers, government and the voluntary sector - both about what we know about patterns in charitable operation at the moment, and what we might like to know in future. This would feed into conversations with the Charity Commission about the utility of collecting this information in the future, and how it might best be approached.

Overall, the project aims to provide a first solid baseline of analysis in an area that is likely to become even more prominent - with aid high on the political agenda; with international charities growing in size; with an increasingly internationally-engaged public; and with data resources that are likely to continue to improve.