Let’s stop using the term “beneficiary” in global development and philanthropic work, and let’s stop asking local organizations to spend hours of their time gathering details to satisfy our expectations of ‘beneficiary metrics’.
Why?
🫴🏽 The word ‘beneficiary’ implies a benevolent giver of charity, and a passive recipient. The concept erases the agency, insights, leadership, and active contributions of community members to their own social change processes.
📊 “Beneficiary numbers” are a poor indicator of actual impact: We all know that a low-touch activity reaching thousands of people can be less impactful, meaningful, and sustainable than a deeper, more longer-term intervention that reaches fewer people.
🙇🏾♀️ Data collection on ‘beneficiary numbers’ is often a burdensome process that detracts community organizations’ focus from the work they actually need to do in their communities, and doesn’t actually provide all that meaningful information anyway.
My thoughtful and brilliant colleague Ronald Kimambo and I consulted with Firelight community partners and others in the sector to unpack these challenges and many more around the concept of ‘beneficiaries’. Based on our learnings, we concluded that the global development and philanthropy sectors need to do away with the term. We suggest alternatives like “participants”, “stakeholders”, “collaborators” and “constituents” – noting that each of these terms is also imperfect.
Read more here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2025.2487786
(Send me a note if you can’t access it and want to read it, and I can send you a copy.)
Please share your thoughts in the comments. Do you still use the term “beneficiary”? If not, what word(s) do you prefer and why?
Sadaf Shallwani 