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By Anita Gallagher, Strategy & Partnerships lead for GivingTuesday’s Latin America and Caribbean Hub
It’s been a long time since mapmaking has shaped the frontiers of human knowledge. Our planet’s contours are well-defined: we know the height of the mountains, the depths of the oceans and the shape of every coastline. Geographic data is so precise that we can now navigate to any new place guided just by the digital maps on our mobile phones.
Philanthropy is slowly undergoing its mapping revolution, too. In the last 30 years, a growing body of academic research and practitioner-led studies has exponentially increased our understanding of how people give to social impact causes. At GivingTuesday, data has been part of our DNA from the start. We remain committed to strengthening our global generosity movement with focused research and actionable insights that empower funders, nonprofits, and communities to inspire giving in new ways.
Yet generosity maps remain incomplete, and nowhere more so than in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Late last year, GivingTuesday’s LAC Hub launched Generosity in LAC1, a region-wide review of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector in the region. The review highlights contemporary patterns of giving, both formal and informal. We examined over 120 international, regional, and national studies to trace historical and contemporary ways of giving, from formal philanthropy to grassroots volunteering.
The findings were both expected and still profoundly concerning. Research on prosocial and generous behaviours in Latin America and the Caribbean is scarce, uneven, and often missing altogether, not because generosity is lacking but because it simply isn’t being measured.
On the one hand, existing data focuses heavily on the size, structure, and, in some cases, tax-deductible financial donation flows toward nonprofit organisations. While this helps track institutional philanthropy, it tells us little about the millions who give outside formal channels through direct aid, mutual support, and community-driven generosity.
Meanwhile, a handful of countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, take centre stage in the available research, likely due to their larger nonprofit sectors and stronger academic networks.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, large-scale philanthropy reports that claim to be global in their scope routinely exclude large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Thirteen of the region’s 33 countries are virtually invisible in international studies, ten of which are from the Caribbean2. The result is a region that, despite its deep-rooted giving traditions, remains overlooked in the conversations that shape global philanthropy.
This scarcity of data has profound implications. Without a fuller picture, Latin America and the Caribbean’s philanthropic traditions remain undervalued and underutilised, leaving researchers, practitioners, and funders with an incomplete map of generosity in the region.
It’s like mapping a country’s transportation system by counting highways while ignoring the bustling networks of footpaths, bicycles, and public transit. Highways are the domain of institutional donors and large financial transfers; they are efficient, structured, and easy to track. But they are only part of the story.
Most movement happens on the side streets, cycle tracks, and pathways through the traditional and informal routes that sustain daily life. Its barter economies, like the chalayplasa in the Andes3, where food is exchanged instead of bought, reinforce age-old traditions of reciprocity. Or community-led cleanup efforts along Caribbean beaches4, where people spend Saturday mornings cleaning up a beach or repainting schools. Or the hundreds of thousands of people who donated food and essential items to those affected by floods in Brazil or hurricanes in Mexico.
These actions don’t fit neatly into traditional philanthropy metrics. Yet, these are the routes most people rely on. They are where generosity is most frequent, needs are met in real-time, and face-to-face connections build trust.
At a time when shifts in international funding priorities are sending shockwaves through philanthropy, we call on researchers, funders, and nonprofit organisations to come together, commit to research, and amplify the impact of new knowledge. By working together, we can build a fuller, more accurate, and more inclusive picture of philanthropy in the region, reflecting how generosity truly moves and supports our communities.
But better data doesn’t just help us see generosity; it can also help us grow it. Understanding why and how people give will allow us to nurture it in natural, sustainable, and culturally rooted ways. Instead of imposing external models, we can amplify giving by working with the region’s existing philanthropic identities.
If we knew more about who gives, how, and why, we could:
- Leverage established norms, using the power of personal connections to overcome institutional distrust through peer-to-peer giving or applying lessons from collective savings groups to better integrate and grow giving circles.
- Be more creative with messaging, framing campaigns in ways that resonate locally – shifting the focus from fundraising to generosity, from donating to solidarity. Celebrating everyday acts of giving can help reclaim the narrative that we are, and have always been, a generous people.
- Promote new forms of generosity, adapting successful models from regions with similar cultural and social dynamics or using digital tools to expand what already exists. This could mean microgiving apps5 making small donations more accessible or pro bono initiatives spreading across different professions.
As the weaknesses of the top-down global development system become more apparent, and the need for a strong, resilient civil society takes centre stage – especially in Latin America, where even the right of association is under threat – expanding knowledge about generosity in Latin America and the Caribbean is not just a data exercise, it is a crucial step.
The highways of institutional philanthropy are well-mapped, but the side streets, cycle paths, and footpaths – the informal, everyday generosity that sustains communities – remain largely invisible. Without a better map, we risk overlooking the ways people already give and missing opportunities to strengthen and expand these networks.
Most importantly, a well-drawn map not only shows us where we are, it can help us know where to go. As leaders within civil society, nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and academic institutions, we need better maps to unlock new strategies, accelerate investment in philanthropic ecosystems, and rethink how we mobilise resources for the future.
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- GivingTuesday Latin America and Caribbean Hub. (2024). Generosity in LAC Report. https://www.givingtuesday.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Generosity-in-LAC-Report-English.pdf
- GivingTuesday Latin America and Caribbean Hub. (2024). Generosity in LAC Report (p. 24). https://www.givingtuesday.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Generosity-in-LAC-Report-English.pdf
- World Giving Library. (2024). Chalayplasa. https://www.worldgivinglibrary.org/entries/chalayplasa/
- Delphinus. (2024). Programa de limpieza de playas y manglares. https://www.delphinusworld.com/es/programa-limpieza-de-playas
- Microgiving apps are digital platforms that facilitate small, frequent donations to charitable causes, nonprofits, or individuals. They make philanthropy more accessible by enabling users to contribute modest amounts regularly, often through round-up donations, recurring contributions, or peer-to-peer giving.
Anita Gallagher is Strategy & Partnerships lead for GivingTuesday’s Latin America and Caribbean Hub, working with social impact leaders and philanthropic organisations to strengthen generosity as an engine for positive change in the region. As the country lead for GivingTuesday Mexico for 10 years and the founder of a successful social impact consultancy specialising in governance, strategy, and communications, she is an experienced speaker, trainer, and advocate for civil society across the Americas.
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