Animal Advocacy Africa
Animal Advocacy Africa works to empower animal advocates who are (interested in) doing work to reduce farmed animal suffering in African countries. They share knowledge, provide connections, and help them build the skills to run an impactful animal advocacy organisation.
What problem is Animal Advocacy Africa working on?
There are approximately 3.4 billion land-based farmed animals in Africa, and a shift towards intensive animal farming practices is expected to occur. Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA) shared the following information on the problem they are working on, and on their approach to solving it:
- The human population of Africa is expected to nearly triple by 2100. Global meat production in Africa has nearly doubled since 2000, and this rate is expected to increase to match the growing population and growing wealth of the continent.
- Of all continents, Africa has the highest growth rate in aquatic farming.
- Farmed animal welfare is incredibly neglected in Africa. AAA estimates that total farmed animal funding for Africa was between $1.5 and 3 million in 2022, a figure consistent with findings from Open Philanthropy and Farmed Animal Funders from previous years. This is less than 1% of global funding for farmed animals.
- AAA believes now is a critical time to help build the animal movement in Africa before animal farming practices become more intensive.
- AAA is one of the first effective altruism aligned organisations dedicated to building the capacities of organisations in Africa by focusing on funding and organisational effectiveness.
What does Animal Advocacy Africa do?
Animal Advocacy Africa is a project of Credence Institute, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the interests of animals. AAA provided the following information about their work:
- Having identified insufficient capacity as a key bottleneck among animal advocacy organisations in Africa, AAA currently supports up to 17 organisations across 8 African countries in 2022, helping them build the critical components of effective, evidence-based charities, ranging from strategy, operations to communications.
- AAA provides stipends to help organisations professionalise and cover their operational costs and technical infrastructure, e.g. internet upgrades, website costs and IT equipment. AAA is also planning to regrant larger amounts to highly promising groups, allowing donors to support grassroots animal advocacy charities with tax-deductible donations.
- AAA has published research about the animal advocacy landscape in Africa. Their upcoming project attempts to determine the possibility of avoiding/preventing the wider spread of industrial animal agriculture in Africa as much as possible, with the aim of saving billions of future animals that would otherwise be born to live in factory farming conditions.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Animal Advocacy Africa?
We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of Animal Advocacy Africa beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.