“We Are Getting Indian Philanthropists To Look Beyond Borders”

PAA was set up to advance a model of collaborative philanthropy, where people think beyond a single donation to a charity, or to a school, or to a hospital, but come together to see what the major challenges are in the areas of climate, health, inclusive development, education, among others.

PAA mobilizes philanthropists from around the world, and in Asia, to come together, as our slogan says, to ‘Priming Asia as a Force for Good’. The team managed to get pledges worth (US) $777 million from philanthropists around the world to put the money to use in Asia.

We've actually started getting into more collaborative philanthropic activities - initiatives beyond the single donations. At this point, we're beginning to see a lot of green shoots in catalytic projects. Some of these projects are multi-year. This is still a beginning of a journey.

We have a Theory of Change - if we start intervening, whether through donations, or affecting public policy, or crowding in private capital, we should be able to solve for some of the really wicked challenges of the world.

Certainly, not easy! It's always easier to donate to causes you are familiar with. But we are set up to do the really difficult thing of actually getting them to talk, to gain their trust, and thereafter to deploy, and make sure they continue to invest in the programs.

Each one of us comes in with a very different level of sophistication on how we approach philanthropy. Everyone has their own idea of what impact looks like. At the PAA, we try and coalesce and lead them on certain things that will really move the needle.

India’s got a long history (of giving) and the 2% (mandatory) CSR spend by industry has helped. The industry for giving and impact in India is probably the most developed in Asia. In terms of the sophistication of intermediaries, the way they debate, how thoughtful they are about the different outcomes, and the plethora and range of programs and program makers. There's so many of them, and competition for attention drives up the quality.

It is bit difficult to make the funders think beyond CSR - in other words, beyond local community action next to your factory. However, I am beginning to see some thoughtful funders interested in dealing with very strategic cross-border global issues, like climate, air pollution. Whether the money comes out of India, that's a second stage - there is very much an India-for-India approach right now for philanthropy.

I'm interested in leveraging learning from India to improve outcomes in the rest of Asia. India is solving some of the hardest social and environmental challenges, and many of those solutions are ready to work well beyond home. Take for instance, Rocket Learning, an Indian non-profit focused on transforming early childhood and foundational learning outcomes at scale, which received investments from the PAA network. When their model becomes more mature, we're hoping to replicate that, adapt it for a country like the Philippines.

One of the other programs we're looking at is extreme heat. We're all facing the same extreme heat in the Tropics. One of our members, Temasek Foundation, is looking at how we build the evidence for extreme heat alerts and how public systems can cope with that. We are looking at models that wraparound parametric insurance.

India provides a really rich fund of programming expertise and evidence that we can kind of export to the rest of the world.

We have around 100 members in the Alliance. We don't charge a fee, but curate the members to make sure they are keen on collaborating with others. We have three funders from India and working on bringing in three or four more to join the Alliance to contribute ideas and maybe co-fund programs in India.

When you look at Asia as a continent it straddles from East Asia, Japan, China, all the way to West Asia. Two very important countries in terms of impact are India and China. We're also growing the number of Chinese philanthropist members. Eventually, together India and China should really make up easily one-third of our memberships.

Interestingly, like India, philanthropy in China has also been very much China-for-China. Now some Chinese funders are keen to see what the rest of the world is doing in terms of thinking about impact.

About a year or so back, the Official Development Assistance pullout made a lot of news. In fact, it created a lot of disruption for NGOs. A lot of them lost jobs or they couldn't fulfill their programs. It highlighted the need to forge resilience (in developing economies). We really need to look at Global South taking care of the Global South.

Inter-generational transfer of wealth is currently underway in India, China and several countries in South Asia. We find the younger generations think more adventurously when it comes to philanthropy. The question is how do we unlock the value (of the wealth) and direct it towards impact in Global South.

My pitch to them is seeing what your Asian brothers and sisters are doing. See what the Africans, the South Americans are doing. Conversations lead to trust. The trust is really the underlying glue towards what we can do together. So join those conversations, even if at the moment you may not be set up to donate money abroad. But that conversation will make us realize that our problems are

all interconnected. The Indian funders may actually have the solutions. And maybe the Indonesian or the Chinese have solutions that might be applicable to the rest of the world. It may not just be about money. It's about what you know and about whom you know, the connectivity, and joining the dots for it all to happen.

Philanthropists are still very traditional. They are just beginning to collaborate with each other. They are used to writing a grant or a cheque, or give a donation. To really drop money into a concessional or blended finance vehicle is really quite a leap. We need to keep educating the philanthropists and encourage them to think how that $1 could multiply into an $5 impact – 5x rather than $1 just feeding into $1 program.

What we also lack are platforms where different pots of capital are pooled into one vehicle - the ideal structure is really a concessional blended finance stack, with different risk appetites, different return profiles.