Asia’s wealth is booming. What about its giving?

Asia is home to more than 1,000 billionaires — a club of tech tycoons, real estate moguls, manufacturing kings, and financial services giants — who are expected to collectively sit on about $4.7 trillion in wealth by 2026. While philanthropic giving in the region currently accounts for only a small slice of that fortune, it’s on the rise, fueled in part by the explosive growth of tech, the surge of unicorn startups, and booming financial markets. For comparison, in the United States, giving has hovered at around 2% of gross domestic product for decades. If Asian donors were to match that, an estimated $702 billion could be unleashed. Major players already shaping the Asian philanthropy landscape include the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust in Hong Kong, the Nippon Foundation in Japan, the Tote Board in Singapore, the Tencent Foundation in China, and Tata Trusts in India, according to the Bridgespan Group, a philanthropic advisory group. Meanwhile, official development assistance, or ODA, to subregions such as Southeast Asia has declined in recent years — and that is separate from the U.S. aid cuts. The U.S. is one of the top five donor countries to the region, but outflanked by multilateral development banks, China, Japan, and Germany, according to the Lowy Institute. That leaves an opportunity for philanthropy to step up, especially in areas such as climate adaptation, food security, and public health. “The world is witnessing a seismic change in the global order, one where rules-based globalization and free trade are being challenged by rising protectionism and nationalism,” Lim Boon Heng, chair of the Philanthropy Asia Alliance, said on Tuesday at the group’s annual Philanthropy Asia Summit in Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. “Philanthropy is also rising to the challenge. Not just to fill funding gaps, but to build cross-sector partnerships and scale solutions,” he added. The theme of this year’s gathering, which saw around 700 attendees from institutions ranging from governments to local NGOs to tech giants like Google, was “Priming Asia for Good.” Measuring Asian giving All these new Asian players are reshaping how development is funded and executed in the region — and which issues are prioritized. "In a continent like Asia, while there have been generations of philanthropic giving, the numbers that actually map that giving aren't 100% accurate," said Naina Subberwal Batra, CEO of Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, or AVPN. Despite the estimated $702 billion in giving potential, it’s much harder to estimate the current reality. That’s because much of giving in Asia — as it is in many lower-income countries — tends to be informal and family-based. A lot is donated via temples, mosques, churches, or local groups, which is not captured in the data. Indeed, countries such as Indonesia and Myanmar consistently rank amongst the world’s most generous, according to surveys — but this is not because of their formalized networks of giving. But that is starting to change, experts said. Some of it is the result of social pressures: “Asia is now home to a large number of billionaires, but equally 50% plus of the population is living under $2 a day,” said Pritha Venkatachalam, partner and co-head for Asia and Africa at The Bridgespan Group. That stark inequality gap has sparked a “clarion call to give more and recognize that society is your stakeholder, not just shareholders.” This increased emphasis on giving — which quietly began around a decade ago, according to Venkatachalam — has also been accompanied by a more regional outlook on giving in a part of the world where philanthropy has tended to be much more local or national. “I'd not heard the term Asian philanthropy until maybe just before COVID,” Venkatachalam said. “Philanthropy in India, in Singapore, was much more country-led. The term Asian philanthropy is much newer.” It has coincided with a rise in regional partnerships and collaboration generally, across a variety of multilateral institutions and settings. For example, the ASEAN Common Carbon Framework — which launched at the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Azerbaijan last fall — aims to promote cross-border trade and accelerate the region’s transition to carbon neutrality. “There is much potential to harness family office wealth attracted to the financial hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong,” Lim Boon Heng said in his speech. “We are also witnessing a shift in giving: from isolated interventions to systemic solutions, from short-term grants to long-term investment, and from charity to catalytic capital.” What makes Asian philanthropy different? Philanthropies in this part of the world have long tended to fund traditional areas of need such as education and health. But as younger generations start to play more prominent roles in organizations, “younger” issues such as climate and environment are also becoming increasingly important to organizations, experts said. Many of these givers also tend to have a more cautious approach than some of their Western counterparts, said Luis Alvarado, who heads the GAEA, or Giving to Amplify Earth Action, initiative at the World Economic Forum. “These are some of the pain points and tensions of Western philanthropy who push for bigger dollars, bigger figures, bigger banks, bigger big bets, right? Asian philanthropy is trying to grapple with how they want to do it,” said Alvarado. “I don't think they want to replicate the Western model, but they are very committed to outcomes.” Philanthropies in Asia tend to be more operative rather than grant-making, Venkatachalam said. According to Bridgespan, 45% of Asian philanthropies fund direct-service programs — meaning they operate their own programs rather than giving grants to nonprofits — compared to just 15% globally. State-linked entities are also more prominent, making up 15% of Asian philanthropies compared to just 5% worldwide. Many Asian philanthropies started as corporate foundations tied to manufacturing or export businesses, which often supported communities around their plants. The region's nonprofit sector is still maturing, so some philanthropists have opted to set up their own teams to deliver results. Asian philanthropy also tends to have a much closer relationship with governments, experts said. “There's a lot of partnerships with government, which is very unique to Asia,” Venkatachalam said. Corporate giving plays an outsized role in Asia, particularly in India, where corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is enshrined in law. India mandates that certain companies spend at least 2% of their profits on CSR activities. “Out of the top 10 or 20 Asian philanthropies, a lot of them are corporate philanthropies,” Venkatachalam noted. This brings advantages: corporate foundations know exactly how to engage their parent companies, giving them powerful leverage. Alvarado called this the “superpower of corporate philanthropy.” Finally, Asian philanthropy is younger overall: more than half of the region’s largest institutional funders were established in the past 20 years, reflecting how fast the sector is organizing itself. Questions for the future Even so, philanthropy in the region is far from a silver bullet — and it isn’t insulated from global economic pressures. Indeed, the trade war ignited by U.S. President Donald Trump could have a major impact on corporate philanthropy, given that it hits corporations’ bottom lines. "We're seeing governments high on debt, paralyzed, the tariff war, companies shrinking their budgets, not knowing if they're going to sell products, and therefore cutting budgets, affecting a lot of the philanthropic or other types of capital that are usually coming out of the profits of that,” said Alvarado. The shift away from relying solely on official development assistance has opened the door for philanthropy to play a bigger role — but also raises questions about sustainability and accountability. As Asian philanthropy grows, the challenge will be whether it can balance rapid growth with thoughtful, equitable approaches that genuinely address structural inequalities.