The Aid Attitudes Tracker

This Gates funded project continues to track public attitudes to aid in the UK, France, Germany and the US. In the UK, it is using a sample of over 8,000 people. The latest UK poll considers whether attitudes have changes since the Brexit referendum. It finds that there has been no significant change in public attitudes to aid since the referendum. However it appears that the trend of declining engagement with global poverty, which has been tracked for the past three years, is continuing. The percentage of people donating to global poverty organisations has dropped from 36 to 22% in the last 12 months; the number of people who have read, watched or listened to a news article about global poverty has declined from 66 to 54% in the same period. Trust in charities is low with 27% of those polled saying they had very little or no trust in charitable organisations. We are working with the team at Gates to design a new piece of research that will look more closely at media consumption habits and how different types of media content influence attitudes to poverty and other global issues.