From Street Alms to Structured Welfare: Measuring Willingness to Finance Institutionalized Mistwat in Ethiopia

Addis Ababa has a problem that doesn't make obvious sense. People give alms constantly. The Orthodox Christian calls it Mistwat. The Muslim calls it Sadaqah. It happens at church gates, at mosque entrances, at traffic lights, on sidewalks. Millions of Birr move from hand to hand every single day. And yet the streets remain full of elderly beggars, orphaned children, and young people with nowhere to go. The giving is real. The desperation is real. They exist side by side. This paper suggests that the problem isn't the amount of giving. It's how the giving happens. Direct, person-to-person, unrecorded cash transfers keep someone alive for a day but don't change the conditions that put them on the street. The money is there. It's just fragmented beyond any ability to coordinate it or measure its effect. I propose something called the Mistwat-to-Welfare Conversion Framework. The idea is simple: take the informal giving that already exists and channel it into structured institutions-elderly care homes, orphanages, youth training centers-without losing the human connection that makes almsgiving meaningful in the first place. I use a contingent valuation survey design with 600 households across three income groups in Addis Ababa to measure how much people would be willing to contribute to a National Dignity Fund. The study isn't just about measuring willingness to pay. It's about whether trust in institutions can substitute for the warm-glow people get from handing coins directly to a beggar. The paper also proposes a governance model drawn from Zakat systems in Malaysia and Indonesia, Jewish tzedakah traditions, Christian tithing structures, and Ethiopia's own Iddir and Iqub associations. And it includes safeguards-local community councils, mandatory donor-recipient contact, dignity-before-efficiency principles-to prevent the whole thing from becoming another cold bureaucracy. This is a pre-analysis plan. The actual data hasn't been collected yet. The full plan will be registered on OSF before fieldwork begins.