Executive Summary

Asia is a continent of stark contrasts. It is home to more billionaires than any other part of the world and its economy is the fastest growing of any region in the world.^[1,2] It is also home to more than 233 million people who live on less than US$1.90 a day, 370.7 million people who are undernourished, and 2.1 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water.^[3,4,5]

Against this backdrop of accelerating wealth creation and unmet needs, The Bridgespan Group with financial support from the Institute of Philanthropy, embarked on a research project to identify the 20 largest global and Asian institutional philanthropies and to spotlight the practices they employ to produce lasting results.

Whilst Asian societies have a long history of charitable giving, today’s wealth holders have begun to give in a more formal way. To date, however, much potential remains untapped. By one estimate, as much as US$702 billion in philanthropic capital per year could be unlocked if Asian countries were to match the United States in terms of philanthropic spending.^[6] The goal of this report is to illuminate practices that might inspire institutional philanthropies, especially in Asia, to give better, to give faster, and to give more, to meet the urgency and scale of social and environmental needs across Asia.

Download the Full Executive Summary

We chose to focus on institutional philanthropies because of their large and growing role in addressing pressing issues such as education, health, economic development, and climate change. To compile our largest-20 lists, we looked at total charitable expenditures over five years from 2018 to 2022. We relied on publicly available information, either annual reports or reports submitted to the government for compliance purposes. Institutional philanthropies that do not publicly report expenditures were not included; neither were private giving not managed by a foundation and giving via corporate social responsibility programmes.

The high-impact practices are drawn from examples we found in Asia and across the world. Philanthropy comes in many beneficial forms and adapts to local contexts and to the assets and aspirations of the philanthropies. So there is much that philanthropies anywhere can learn not only from the practices themselves – which, to be sure, are more a set of principles to inspire philanthropies than a regimented process to follow – but also from how the practices were applied by Asian philanthropies in their local contexts.

The full executive summary, which can be downloaded using the button above, is an overview of our findings and includes: the largest-20 lists, similarities and differences between global and Asian philanthropies, and five high-impact practices used by these philanthropies. We will follow up with a companion report that brings the practices to life with examples from the largest-20 philanthropies.