A new picture of giving across Asia
A clearer picture of philanthropy in Asia is beginning to emerge. Much of the region's giving comes from citizens, businesses, and governments working through a diverse mix of formal and informal channels. The Commission on Asian Philanthropy’s Interim Report provides one of the most comprehensive attempts to quantify that picture.
The Commission estimates domestic giving across participating jurisdictions at US$109bn in 2024, equivalent to more than US$1tn over the next decade, or as much as US$1.5tn with continued organic growth. Those jurisdictions between them cover roughly 70 percent of Asia’s population and 80 percent of its GDP.
The distinctive part is not the total but its composition. Citizens contribute roughly US$55bn, about half of everything measured; businesses roughly US$27BN, or 25 percent; governments, through public discretionary funding, roughly US$23bn, or 21 percent; and ultra-high-net-worth-individuals (UHNWIs) US$4bn, or 4 percent. Philanthropy in Asia, in other words, is everyday giving from citizens, businesses, and governments participating in philanthropy together.
Even those figures likely understate the true scale, because so much everyday giving moves through channels no registry captures. A national survey supported by the Commission in Indonesia, the first such survey in more than 20 years, found US$20.8bn a year in Islamic giving alone, with roughly 80 percent of it moving through informal networks rather than registered charities. The shortfall the Commission identifies is not in generosity but in visibility: the giving was already happening; nobody had built the instruments to see it.
These contributions should not be measured through funding alone. Philanthropy in Asia does not operate as a sector apart from the state, the market, and the community, the three “societal engines” of development, but as a microcosm where all three meet and reinforce one another. Five philanthropy models, community-led, faith-based, corporate-led, state-led and UHNWI-led, each contribute distinct capabilities to that collaborative infrastructure: trusted last-mile networks, institutional legitimacy, patient risk capital, the capacity to coordinate public and private capital toward a shared national mission. The Commission frames this as a shift in the question worth asking, from how much philanthropic giving exists to how philanthropic ecosystems can increase overall societal impact
China and India offer two illustrations. In China, state-led and corporate-led philanthropy helped lift nearly 99m rural residents out of extreme poverty between 2013 and 2020, mobilising government, business, and community actors in a coordinated effort that reached more than 18m people directly. Its success lay in how those capabilities were brought together. In Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, state-led and community-led philanthropy spent a decade organising 12m rural women into more than a million self-help groups, building both a trusted, last-mile network and access to US$4.7bn in credit for livelihoods, capabilities that together transformed how public services and finance reached the poorest.
From this, the Commission draws three recommendations: improve data visibility so jurisdictions can see the resources they already have, learn from growth playbooks that have already worked at scale elsewhere in the region, and integrate philanthropic ecosystems into national planning rather than treating them as separate from it. Malaysia's finance ministry has already tried the third: folding the philanthropic arms of state-linked companies into a coordinated push on wages and living standards for its most vulnerable workers, rather than letting that capacity run on a separate track from policy. This is a starting point rather than a conclusion; over the coming year, Commission members will engage leaders and decision-makers across the region to shape a Final Report and Action Roadmap, due in 2027.