FILIPINOS are among the least generous people in Southeast Asia, with only a few donating money to a charity and volunteering their time to an organization, according to a global Gallup poll involving 146 countries.
Based on Gallup’s The World’s Most Generous Countries Index, the Philippines had a score of only 28 while other Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, which topped the rankings, scored 59.
“The report also sheds light on how generous the whole world is. With all the reports about crime, war and terrorism served up daily in the media, it may surprise you to find out how many people are actively working to make the world a better place,” Gallup Global Managing Partner Jon Clifton said.
“Almost 1 billion people reported volunteering their time to an organization in the past month, nearly 1.4 billion said they donated money to a charity and more than 2 billion reported helping a stranger in need,” he added.
Gallup asked adults in 146 countries whether they have donated money to a charity, volunteered their time to an organization, and helped a stranger or someone they didn’t know who needed help.
It compiled the “positive” responses to these three questions into a Civic Engagement Index score for each country.
The higher the score, the higher the proportion of the population that is “civically engaged.” The index score for the world overall in 2017 is 30 out of a possible 100.
Gallup said country scores ranged widely, from a high of 59 in Indonesia and Australia to a low of 15 in Yemen. In Asean, Indonesia and Singapore had the highest Civic Engagement scores.
However, Gallup noted that Civic Engagement scores were not only high in rich countries but in poor and developing countries.
Myanmar, for one, topped the global rankings when it came to donating to charity, while Libya topped the rankings in terms of helping strangers who needed help.
“Regardless of who you think are the most generous countries in the world, this report suggests one important thing: You don’t need to be rich to give back. Some countries where people have far less to give are among the most generous,” Clifton said.
Gallup said the results were based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults per country, aged 15 and older, conducted throughout 2017 in 146 countries.
For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error ranges from ±2 percentage points to ±5.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.