Brits are being put off donating to international humanitarian charities by concerns about how their money is spent, according to a survey released today.

A third of people in Britain told a YouGov poll that they do not give to humanitarian charities in the course of a year, placing Britain below France, Belgium and Germany where a slightly larger portion of the population gives to such causes.  

The majority of Britons said that they were deterred from donating because they were unsure of how their money would be spent by the charities they gave to. A third said they would be inclined to give more if they had a personal connection to the foreign event or disaster, and 20 per cent said they would be motivated to donate if they had visited a country which was the beneficiary of a humanitarian fundraising campaign.

While one in five Londoners gives more than £50 a year to humanitarian causes, this figure falls when the whole country is calculated, to one in seven.

When asked which of the recent international humanitarian disasters were most deserving of aid, the Haiti earthquake (pictured) topped the list, closely followed by the Japanese tsunami disaster, which 40 per cent of respondents said was deserving of aid.  

Nicholas Rutherford, event director at AidEx, which commissioned the research, described the results as “worrying yet unsurprising”.

“There has always been a certain level of scepticism around the delivery of aid following humanitarian crises, but this has not often been directly linked to actual donations, or indeed lack of them.”

The research will be presented at the AidEx conference today.

Image copyright Peta de Aztlan.