Where I live in Uganda, there's a huge amount of giving already - in fact depending on how you define giving, people use far higher percentages of their income on other people than most westerners. But it works very differently. Local giving fits into something like these 3 categories

1. Giving within families (the majority). I estimate 1/4 of our nurses' income goes towards supporting their family members with things like school fees, medical bills and even just cash for their paren Aspects of this system have has been pejoritvely called a "black tax" at times

2. "Patronage" giving. Politicians buy ambulances and put their photo on it, wealthy people sponsor orphans, Rich businesses pay for "health camps". Most of this giving is directly connected to the 
work and life of the "giver" and buys them status and good will in their communities. I put CSR in this category too - A local microfinance company built a maternity unit for us a few years ago which is great. I would rate this giving as more effective than most Western Giving but obviously not EA level. 

3. Religious giving. People give to support local poor people, local hospitals or prisoners because they believe its the right thing to do, and a responsibility. For example the local Pentecostal church sponsored sitting benches for one of our health centers, even though they have nothing to do with the health facility at all which was pretty cool.

I know countries like Nigeria do have somewhat of a "philanthropy" system in the western sense, but I imagine a lot of this is heavily connected to patronage too.

I have never heard of a local here giving money to an international NGO. That's completely off the radar. NGOs are usually seen as often ineffective sources of money for local people, not something that you would spend your own precious money on. How could you justify giving money to an org that pays someone an absurd $3,000 dollars a month when your cousin needs money for school fees? At least that's how I see the logic working.

I struggle to see how giving to animal welfare could plausibly fit these categories. I would doubt  whether there are really any significant number of richer Africans who care about animal welfare enough to give money. But I only know the Ugandna context well.

Do you think EA communities underinvest in developing donors outside high-income countries?

My instinct is yes, based from what I observe in my sector (arts). 

People like Aubrey Bergauer (an arts business guru specialising in creating sustainable revenue streams for arts organisation) keep saying that organisations routinely miss out on steady revenue stream right under their noses by focussing too much on High Net Worth individuals or institutional funding opportunities and completely forgetting about the people who use their services / can see the impact it makes in their community as potential donors.

Yes, those people have much smaller donation capabilities on an individual level, but compounded together they represent a non-trivial source of income. They are also beneficial in other ways in the sense that, with the right care, they are highly involved and might turn into a free source of advertising / advocating for your cause. However...

If you are in an LMIC and have considered donating effectively: what made it easier or harder?

I'm from Morocco and even though charity as a concept is widely practised (mostly because of religious reasons / culture), the notion of donation effectiveness is almost never a consideration within the general public (even less so than in developed countries). Or RATHER, effectiveness is assessed on a very very personal level (i.e. I personally know the family I am giving to, and know that my donation will be put to good use), but not through a dispassionate, EA-like approach that looks at total effectiveness potential of a donation in the abstract, detached of any personal connection to the people / animals you could be helping.
 

(There is also much of the kind of 'patronage' donation style that @NickLaing is mentioning when talking about the Nigerian context)

So in summary, although there might be something to gain by mobilising a local population that is both used to charitable giving and is closer to the impact of your work, you might find that because the notions of effective giving and rigorous consideration of impact are not nearly as implanted as in developed countries, you might have less success in achieving donations from local populations, especially as an animal advocacy group, which, unless you view it through the lens of non-species specific quantified impact (a lens that is often missing in the general population of many LMIC countries), might unfavourably compare to human-centric causes.

 

Thank you for the text. In principle, I think that effective giving and earning to give are underestimated within EA. However, when it comes to advocating for more attention to these topics, focusing on LMICs would be the last thing that comes to mind for me, simply because the earning and donation potential is significantly lower.

The points you mention are broadly correct, but the question is whether they compensate for the enormous differences in potential when it comes to the amount of money. In Uganda, the median income per day is $2.56, while in the US it is $70 (source: Our World in Data). If someone pursues earning to give, earns twice the median income, and donates half of it, the amount donated in the US is 27 times higher. To generate the same level of donations, you would therefore need either one person in the US doing earning to give or 27 people in Uganda. Even if the person in the US cannot allocate the money within Uganda as effectively because of their outsider perspective, it would already be enough if they donated just one twenty-seventh of their donations to the most effective organizations for the outcome to be better overall.

Of course, for any individual person in an LMIC it is impossible to say in general terms which career path will be the most impactful. If someone does not want to work for an NGO, in politics, or for a company relevant to animal welfare, then earning to give could certainly be interesting (effective giving can also be practiced while having direct impact). But I would assume that this case occurs rather rarely. As far as I know, the underfunding of the animal movement in places like Africa is also partly due to funders in the global North not knowing where they can sensibly donate money, or believing that they do not know, meaning they suspect that the opportunities they already know might not be as effective. In that case, it would be even more important to have people doing strong direct work in those countries.

More generally, I also consider dependence on funders from the global North to be problematic. However, that primarily reflects the global disparities in income and wealth, and we will unfortunately not change that significantly in the foreseeable future. Therefore, we should focus on how to deal with that reality.

Regarding a few of the arguments mentioned:
“Even modest local funding can change how work is framed: from ‘externally funded projects’ to ‘something people here care about.’” -> I would say that one can also say that people care about it if they are directly working for the NGO.
“External funding priorities can shift with philanthropic trends, macroeconomic conditions, or changing attention.” -> Philanthropic trends exist among all donors, including local donors. And if the goal is to be less dependent on macroeconomic conditions, it would be best to have a globally diversified donor base. If there are disproportionately many donors from a single country, for example the country where the projects are carried out, fluctuations are actually more likely when that country experiences something like an economic crisis.

If we want to address the problem of underfunding and some of the other points raised, regranting initiatives such as the one Vasco already proposed could help in my view. Another option would be a stronger focus on small donors in the global North. At the moment, this barely exists, partly because the work in places like Africa is not widely known, and partly because of tax disadvantages. These disadvantages do not exist for large donors, since with larger sums it becomes worthwhile to set up a corresponding contract or similar arrangement to obtain the tax benefits.

More generally, I would think that if we are discussing whether there should be more earning to give in LMICs, this mainly shows that we are still neglecting it far too much in industrialized countries.

Thanks for the interesting post, Moritz. As a partial solution, people from high income countries could fund regranting initiatives in LMICs.