Analysis of Funding for Animal Causes in Africa

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Farmed animal funding towards Africa is growing but remains highly neglected, published by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica on February 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post is a summary of our recent report "Mapping the Charitable Funding Landscape for Animal Welfare in Africa: Insights and Opportunities for Farmed Animal Advocacy". We only included the most relevant parts for EA Forum readers here and invite interested readers to consult the report for more details and insights.
TL;DR
Funding towards the farmed animal advocacy movement in Africa has grown significantly over the past years, especially from EA-aligned funders. Despite these increases, farmed animal advocacy remains underfunded.
We hope that this report can help us and other stakeholders to more rapidly and effectively build the farmed animal advocacy movement in Africa. We aim to use and amplify the growing momentum identified in this report and call on any individual or organisations interested in contributing to this cause to contact us and/or increase their resources and focus dedicated towards farmed animal welfare in Africa.
Motivation
Industrial animal agriculture is expanding rapidly in Africa, with the continent projected to account for the largest absolute increase in farmed land animal numbers of any continent between 2012 and 2050 (
Kortschak, 2023).
Despite its vast scale, the issue is highly neglected by charitable funding. Lewis Bollard (
2019) estimated that farmed animal advocacy work in Africa received only USD 1 million in 2019, less than 1% of global funding for farmed animal advocacy. Farmed Animal Funders (
2021) estimated funding to Africa at USD 2.5 million in 2021, a significantly higher but still very low amount. Accordingly, activists and organisations on the ground cite a lack of funding as the main bottleneck for their work (
Tan, 2021).
Since 2021, Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA) has actively worked towards strengthening the farmed animal advocacy movement in Africa, with some focus on improving funding. With this report, we aim to understand the funding landscape for farmed animal advocacy in Africa in depth, identifying key actors, patterns, and trends. Notably, we focus on charitable grants and exclude any government funding that might be relevant as well.
Our research aims to build transparency and enhance information on what is being done to help animals in Africa, which can help various stakeholders to make better decisions. While we focus on farmed animals, we also provide context on other animal groups. We hope that the findings from our analysis can contribute to funders shifting some of their resources from less neglected and potentially lower-impact projects to more neglected and potentially higher-impact ones.
Data basis
Based on the funding records of 131 funders that we suspected might have funded African animal causes in the past, we created a database of 2,136 records of grants towards animal projects in Africa. This grant data allowed us to base our analysis on real-world data, which provides an important improvement to previous research, which was typically based on self-reported surveys with funders and/or charities.
Findings
Overall funding levels
We estimate at an 80% confidence level that the funders in scope for this analysis granted a total of USD 25 to 35 million to animal-related causes in Africa in 2020. These grants had substantially increased from 2018 to 2020.
Funding for animal causes in Africa shows interesting patterns that contrast, to a certain extent, with trends observed in the animal advocacy movement globally (
Animal Charity Evaluators, 2024). Wild animal and conservation efforts receive the most funding. Notably, the projects in this category do not follow the wild animal suffering approach typically discussed in Effective Altruism ...