The rise of the novel Coronavirus disease affected the development of African countries. The flow of financial resources to support the fight against the pandemic has dwindled. The pandemic has had a severe impact on the programmes and operations of the government, private sector and civil society organisations. In Ghana, local mobilisation of resources through giving was used as an approach to generate internal resources to fight the pandemic. The West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) in partnership with the Special Attention Project and STAR Ghana Foundation, therefore, set out to investigate the trend and the scope of local giving in Ghana and assess its applicability as an alternative resource mobilisation approach for civil society organisations.
The study investigated this phenomenon by adopting the mixed-method approach, which includes the use of both qualitative and quantitative surveys. The study found that Ghanaians were giving in cash and kind to support efforts to fight the pandemic. These donations were received mostly from people in the working-age group with high income. Citizens of the high social class, celebrities, leaders of religious institutions as well as members of the civil society sector also donated to the cause. From the study, Ghanaians acknowledge that CSOs have the ability to reach out and support the poor and vulnerable.
However, giving directly to the civil society sector was found to be low because of citizens' perception of the sector and the difficulties in identifying organisations to support. The study recommends that government should put in place the requisite formal structures and systems for giving, to facilitate the process of giving to the sector through domestic resource mobilisation as a sustainable approach towards supporting social justice, social protection and social accountability in Ghana.
However, for such an infrastructure to be exploited by local donors, CSOs are encouraged to build a strong sense of trust with local donors. They can do this by effectively communicating, ideally via face to face and or social media channels with strategically targetted audiences. According to the findings of this study, CSOs can target working age citizens (persons between the ages of 26 and 60) who have a higher ability to give, hence, are more likely to give to support social causes.
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- Copyright: WACSI, SAP, STAR Ghana Foundation, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.