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.
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
2. See supplementary file for the questionnaire
3. Studies have alternatively measured charitable giving (i) frequency of charitable giving (money and time; Brown & Ferris, Citation2007; De Wit & Bekkers, Citation2016) and (ii) amount donated and hours volunteered (De Wit & Bekkers, Citation2016).
4. The PCA results for the agreeableness and empathic concern indexes are shown in the Appendix (see respectively).
5. We utilized the Stata command “ivprobit”.
6. See, Lemon et al. (Citation1972, p. 32)
7. This is from the perspective of the corresponding errors (unobserved determinants)