Philanthropy in India
Review on the Candid portal that provides comprehensive information on Indian philanthropy.
What are the common challenges with data?
You are sitting on top of terabytes of data but the talent has no clue on how to derive insights and solve data problems. Sometimes people fail to have simple design sense and create data representations that gives you nightmares.
And finally when you don’t want to reveal the data to the public.
All the above challenges are applicable to all Nonprofit organisations.
Arif Ekram Global Partnerships Manager, Candid states that India’s philanthropic sector suffers from an acute shortage of data availability and transparency. “Often contained in their own bubbles, philanthropic actors of India usually do not know who is doing what and where, who is contributing to which subject area, which population groups are getting help from which high net-worth donors, foundations, or corporations, and where their money could most complement government actions.”
“Similarly, international foundations that fund or want to fund programs in India often see only a partial picture as they support projects in India. The lack of data results in inefficiency, redundancy, and an incredible loss of opportunity to collaborate within the sector and with other development actors outside philanthropy. As a result, millions of lives across India that philanthropy could help remain out of reach.”
Even the Foreign Contribution Regulations Act (FCRA) data falls short. “The lion’s share of the reported data remains largely unusable. The lack of a data standard renders the data useless. To make the FCRA data useful, one must go through a thorny data-massaging process, which is time-consuming and expensive. Even then, a large part of the data remains hopelessly inadequate for any useful application.”
So to address all the above-mentioned problems Candid - an international nonprofit organization that provides data tools on nonprofits, foundations, and grants, launched ‘Philanthropy in India’, a website that provides comprehensive information on Indian philanthropy.
The website making funding data on India’s social sector publicly available, free of cost is in collaboration with Ashoka University’s Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP)
Philanthropy in India
The portal is divide into four major sections - Dashboard, Funding Map, Reports, and Latest News
The dashboard is the collection of funding(private) sources from 2015-18 in India which can be sorted and displayed according to the various filters. These filters are your Type, GEO Sources, Destination, and the respective year.
For example, I did a quick search to find out how much funding landed from international waters to the state of Maharastra in 2018. The below snapshot provides the reported details for the state.
If you click on the “Explore Region” you go deeper to find out particular loations in Maharastra. Health remained the biggest focus from Foundation givers in 2018. The search also provides a list of Top Funders and Top Recipients in the state for 2018.
Observation: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from the US remains the top funders from 2015-18 in India. Top Recipient from India remains Unknown(Rs.407.2B). Isn’t that interesting and then we keep moaning that people don’t trust Nonprofit organizations.
Also, the Geographic Focus(2015-18) data gives a preview of how the funding lands more in the wealthy states. See the far north and east of India - I believe the shade couldn’t be lighter anymore. While this is my assessment but this could also mean a lack of data capturing by the portal which is just come into existence.
State of individual giving (2015-18)
The data is from the era of Pre-COVID so the role of individual giving was marginal. However, the search reveals that Human Services, Education, Health, and Religion have been the subject focus for individual donors.
So if you are a Nonprofit organization in this area should you still keep debating the impact of Individual Giving in India.
However, the majority of Top Funders in the Individual Giving filter coming from the offshore market remain anonymous and the Top Recipients are the leading religious organizations in the country.
The recently released The India Giving Benchmark Report also highlighted the growing trend in the country: “35% of Indian nonprofit annual revenue comes from individual donors (the largest single source), followed by government (18%) and companies/CSR (13%). The responses varied quite a bit by the size of the organization and by their location.”
The report is an in-depth survey of Samhita GoodCSR’s network of 2,800 nonprofit organizations about their funding sources, resource development methods, donor engagement strategies, and efforts to build a base of life-long donors.
Funding Map
This is the second level of funding data that has been displayed in a brilliant manner by the great minds at Candid. The section takes you to the portal - Foundation Maps which is better displayed on the web. This is also the business side of Candid with respect to the data visualisation it is providing.
The below snapshot geolocations of recipients in the State of Maharastra for Health Care Access. You can click on the geolocations and get more recipient details.
According to the data: Reliance Foundation was the biggest granter to the State Government in 2020 for COVID and health programs. The Ford Foundation gave to the organisation Men Against Violence and Abuse.
One can play extensively with the available data on who is giving, to whom, where, and how much. Even Nonprofits planning for their funding sources can study the data and pinpoint organisations to reach out. Candid just made the job easy within few clicks.
With all the merit the portal comes with its limitations. “We have very little data on grants made by Indian foundations; giving by Indian foundations is one of the largest gaps in the portal. Also, the number of grants reported in a year can vary widely as philanthropic actors’ data reporting may differ from year to year. As a result, we cannot run some much-needed key analysis, including trend analysis, of Indian philanthropy. In other words, the portal is as good as the data on it,” says Arif.
To overcome the challenges Candid is inviting Indian philanthropic actors to share their data.
“Not only because sharing data can enrich the portal for them but also because it can help the sector become a better version of itself.”
Makes more sense when the sector is trying its best to reveal its funding sources and working on bringing accountability. Even the Indian government is finally showing seriousness in regulating the foreign fund flow without accountability.