This November Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) published the first detailed report of its Future World Giving project, Building Trust in Charitable Giving. This looks at what governments can and should do to build public trust in giving. 

This report, and the Future World Giving project more widely, focuses on the mid- to long-term goal of facilitating mass participation in charitable giving. The concept paper for the project, Unlocking the Potential of Global Philanthropy, estimated that by 2030 a rapidly growing global middle class could contribute close to a quarter of a trillion dollars a year ($250,000 billion) to charity by donating just 0.4 per cent of their income (approximately the annual average in the UK).

We all recognize that public trust is something that non-profits must earn, through openness and transparency, by engaging with beneficiaries and communities and by demonstrating impact. We must also recognize that any approach to improving public confidence in charitable giving must include government. Building Trust in Charitable Giving raises concerns that if governments do not act now to remove unnecessary barriers to formal recognition of non-profits and to improve the regulatory environment, a lack of public trust could make this positive vision of the future impossible.

The report puts forward a framework of recommendations that is universal. A common truism among philanthropy, and indeed development, experts is that-one-size-fits-all approaches can never work as they do not take into account the local context in which organizations operate. This prevents any development of a common understanding of what governments should and should not do to improve the conditions for giving. We believe that there are certain principles that are transferable. By breaking down our recommendations into three ‘tiers’, we present a framework that allows less economically developed countries to reach for a standard that is attainable with minimal resource implications while presenting recommendations in tiers 2 and 3 that should serve to challenge any sense of complacency in wealthier nations.

For more information
Visit the Future World Giving blog at http://futureworldgiving.org for updates on the project