New UN handbook profiles non profits in Africa
By Cristina Müller, Communication Officer, ECA
23 March 2004

Nonprofit or civil society organizations, philanthropy, and voluntarism increasingly attract attention in Africa for their contributions to the challenges of poverty alleviation, development, environmental protection, and social exclusion.

To map the economic profile of nonprofit institutions on the continent, the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), led by ECA’s Economic and Social Policy Division recently launched in a Nairobi workshop the UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions, jointly developed with the John Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies (JHU/CCSS) and the United Nations Volunteers agency (UNV).

To date, data on the organizations operating on the continent has been largely unavailable, making it difficult to assess their role and development, as well as consequent regulatory public policy.

Albeit limited in the scope of its data, research carried out by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project in a number of African countries reveals that these organizations are a far more significant economic presence than previously recognized.

 In Kenya, for example, nonprofit organizations employed more workers than the utilities, construction, transportation, and manufacturing sectors as of the late 1990s.  In South Africa, nonprofit organizations are a $1.7 billion industry, engaging a larger workforce than the nation’s key industry, and mining. Similar stories can be told in Uganda, Tanzania, and other African nations.

The new Handbook develops comprehensive and detailed economic profiles of nonprofit institutions. It calls on national statistics offices to gather and publish “satellite accounting” on non-profit institutions, and to estimate the volunteer effort mobilized by these organizations.

A worldwide effort, so far, 14 countries (Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, Italy, Kenya, New Zealand, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay) have committed to implementing the Handbook. Of this total, six have already generated data. In addition, the United Nations Volunteers and a number of private foundations have committed resources to help defray some of the implementation costs in a core set of pilot countries.