This paper provides new empirical evidence about English and Welsh charities operating internationally. It answers basic questions unaddressed in existing work: how many charities work overseas, and how has this number changed over time? In which countries do they operate, and what underlies these geographical patterns? It makes use of a unique administrative dataset which records every country in which each charity operates. The results show a sizeable increase in the number of charities working overseas since the mid-1990s. They show that charities are much more likely to work in countries with colonial and linguistic ties to the UK, and less likely to work in countries with high levels of instability or corruption. This considerable geographical unevenness, even after controlling for countries’ population size and poverty, illustrates the importance of supply-side theories and of institutional factors to an understanding of international voluntary activity. The paper also serves to provide a new perspective on international charitable operation: while it is the large development charities that are household names, the results reveal the extent of small-scale ‘grassroots’ registered charitable activity that links people and places internationally, and the extent of activity in ‘developed’ as well as ‘developing’ country contexts.

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