What drives formal and informal cash and in-kind giving, and volunteering, and is the relationship substitutable or complementary? Evidence from Ghana

ABSTRACT

Anecdotal evidence of philanthropic practices has accumulated over the years through oral traditions and all over the psyche of the African, yet it is seldom studied empirically. By decomposing charitable giving into its spheres of formal and informal, this study examined the determinants and relationship of charitable giving in Ghana. Our findings, based on survey data from 1,533 household heads and instrumental variable probit model, revealed that while marital status, education, household size, religiosity, ethnicity, and empathic concern are important predictors of formal cash and in-kind giving, informal cash and in-kind giving is driven by income, religiosity and empathic concern. On the other hand, it was evident that formal volunteering is mainly determined by income, household size, religiosity, and empathic concern, whereas gender and religiosity influence informal volunteering. Furthermore, we established that, in both spheres of formal and informal giving, the relationship between cash and in-kind giving and volunteering is complementary. Premised on these findings, we recommend nonprofits and policymakers to recognize the complementary role and distinctive determinants of the spheres of giving in designing tools and policies to raise the levels and effectiveness of fundraising and volunteering campaigns.

KEYWORDS:

• Philanthropy
• charitable giving
• volunteering
• instrumental variable probit
• Ghana

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Many thanks to all the informants for their insight, and the field enumerators who assisted in the data collection of this research. We are also thankful to Muazu Ibrahim and Emmanuel Kumi for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2022.2072041

Notes

1. See https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/philanthropy-in-ghana-featured-by-alliance

2. See supplementary file for the questionnaire

3. Studies have alternatively measured charitable giving (i) frequency of charitable giving (money and time; Brown & Ferris, 2007; De Wit & Bekkers, 2016) and (ii) amount donated and hours volunteered (De Wit & Bekkers, 2016).

4. The PCA results for the agreeableness and empathic concern indexes are shown in the Appendix (see Tables A2 and A3 respectively).

5. We utilized the Stata command “ivprobit”.

6. See, Lemon et al. (1972, p. 32)

7. This is from the perspective of the corresponding errors (unobserved determinants)

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported with a grant from the Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment (CAPSI), Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.