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The UN Nonprofit Handbook Project

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The UN Nonprofit Handbook Project seeks to improve the treatment of nonprofit, or civil society, organizations in national economic statistics. A major barrier to improved understanding of the nonprofit sector is the lack of basic statistics on the scope, structure, financing, and activities of this set of organizations. The lack of information reflects, in part, the way nonprofits are treated in the System of National Accounts (SNA), the set of international guidelines for compiling national economic statistics.

Under SNA guidelines, many organizations identified as "nonprofit institutions" are grouped together with for-profit corporations or government agencies in national statistics, leaving only a small percentage assigned to a separate sector called "Nonprofit Institutions Serving Households," or NPISH. In addition, national economic statistics do not now count the work of most volunteers. This makes it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of the scale and contributions of nonprofit organizations.

The Nonprofit “Satellite Account” 

This Handbook calls on national statistical offices to prepare a “satellite account” on the nonprofit sector and philanthropy as part of their regular economic data gathering and reporting. These satellite accounts will pull together a much more comprehensive and reliable picture of the civil society sector than has ever been available. As part of this process, statistical agencies are also called on to estimate the scale and value of the volunteer effort these organizations mobilize and to include this in estimates of economic activity.

The completion of this Handbook will thus produce a quantum leap forward in the basic information available on civil society organizations, philanthropy, and voluntarism around the world, increasing the visibility and credibility of these organizations and making it possible to gauge their contributions and track their evolution. Among the information that will become available through this process will be data on: 

• The number of civil society organizations, by field;
• The number of civil society workers, paid and volunteer;
• The “value added” by civil society organizations;
• The value of volunteer contributions, by field;
• Operating expenditures;
• Sources of revenue, including philanthropy, fees, and government support, both domestic and cross-national;
• The size and distribution of foundation grants.

Such information will be available on a broad range of civil society organizations, including development organizations, schools, health clinics, social service agencies, environmental groups, human rights groups, sport clubs, professional associations, foundations, and many more.

The Remaining Challenge 

Promising though the acceptance of this Handbook is, however, its implementation is far from automatic. The System of National Accounts, of which this Handbook is now a part, is a consensus system. Countries are encouraged to abide by its guidelines but are not required to do so. To take full advantage of the opportunity the adoption of this Handbook has created, therefore, additional steps are needed. These include disseminating the Handbook to national statistical agencies, encouraging them to adopt it, ensuring effective implementation, and creating a mechanism to assemble and report the results.

Civil Society Information Network (CiviNet)

To pursue these steps, the United Nations Statistics Division has authorized the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies to organize a Handbook implementation process. The Center, in turn, has formed a Civil Society Information Network, or CiviNet, comprised of cooperating statistical agencies and research organizations to coordinate the effort. To date, 31 countries have committed to implementing the Handbook or some version of it (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Korea, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Slovakia, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, the United States, and Vietnam). 

Project Partners

A number of organizations have lent their support to the implementation effort, including Eurostat, the OECD Statistics Directorate, the European Commission’s Directorate for Enterprise, United Nations Volunteers, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the Economic and Social Policy Division of the Economic Commission for Africa, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Skoll Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Project Staff

Lester M.Salamon, Director

S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Senior Research Associate

Helen Stone Tice, Senior Research Associate

Megan Haddock, Project Coordinator

Additional Information