Transformational collaboration, Asian leadership, empowered communities, urgent action: AVPN CEO Naina Batra offered these four rallying cries in her opening remarks of this year’s conference in Kuala Lumpur. These themes or some combination were to echo and re-echo across the 103 sessions that made up the conference, supported and hosted by Malaysian foundation, Yayasan Hasanah, whose own forum, Fostering Justice-Based Philanthropy, ran in tandem with the AVPN event.

The opening speakers played on one or more of these themes.  Dato’ Shahira Ahmed Bazari, welcoming delegates on behalf of Yayasan Hasanah, spoke of the need to mesh the local and the global. In her keynote speech, delivered by video link, Dato’ Seri Paduka Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director of UN-Habitat and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, insisted on the need for measurement. Governments have an obligation to establish priorities and turn them into policies, she said. However, ‘if it can’t be measured, it can’t be quantified and if it can’t be quantified it can’t be translated into action.’ Development must be anchored in human rights and she pointed to the central role of women in this connection. ‘Women must be at the table or they will be on the menu,’ she said. Women’s empowerment and the growth of women’s business were essential to create the trust and partnership needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. They would also require all sectors to work in partnership, with risk-sharing and pooled finance crucial and, pointing the moral, she noted that this is what AVPN is about. Meeting the SDGs, she concluded, would require courageous leaders.

Partnership as the engine for positive change

Leading Indian businessman and Chair of the Piramal Foundation, Ajay Piramal took up the theme of courage, urging delegates to be bold. He touched on the theme of compassion and the described the element of spirituality in his giving, drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. We are only the trustees of wealth, he said, therefore we should use it for all of society.  Business ‘can be a force for good’, he said, and profit is the oxygen that keeps us alive, though life requires more than oxygen. He, too, urged the need for foundations both to do good and to perform well in order to produce impact and stressed, as other speakers were to do, ‘impact can only happen we work in partnership.’ Piramal Foundation now has hundreds of partners across its areas of work which include health, water and education, but for development to happen at scale, he urged, the most important partner is government.

There was also general recognition that philanthropy by no means has all the answers to the tripartite conundrum of power, trust and relationships.

The theme of the private sector as a force for beneficial social change was also the theme of a later session. Eugenia Koh of Standard Chartered Bank said corporates can play a role in financing the energy transition in the region and, in token, SCB had made a USD300m to transition projects. What’s more, social purpose increasingly has employee backing, to the point, said Effendi Azmi Hashim of Malysia Cognizant where it is an incentive either to join the company or remain with it, since employees feel aligned with the company’s purpose. Eugenia Koh endorsed this. During the pandemic, the idea of supporting SCD’s textile manufacturing clients to switch to mask-making during Covid had originated from the bank’s employees.

Trust-based philanthropy: action, not name

Given the growing attention paid to trust-based philanthropy in the light of the pandemic and the well-publicised gifts of Mackenzie Scott, it was no surprise to find the topic on the agenda. But how ‘new’ is this supposedly new idea, especially in Asia where relationships have always been the essential basis for giving? Pratima Harite of the Lenovo Foundation, for one, remarked that Lenovo had long been practising trust-based giving without actually calling it that and the same is probably true of many delegates. Lenovo, which works principally in STEM education in underserved communities, speaks of partners, not grantees. Typically, it chooses where and who it funds and makes funding unrestricted. ‘We know our strengths, they knew theirs,’ she said. Amy Rahe of the Freedom Fund which works on issues of modern slavery notes that the organisation they support (between five and fifteen groups) who are grassroots organisations led by survivors of modern slavery, want development funding, not project funding and they can’t get that from big funders because they can’t meet the reporting requirements. Freedom Fund in conjunction with other funders provides a Survivor Leadership Fund allowing them to get to a position where they can access bigger pots.

Moreover, trust is essential in allowing innovation to flourish, said Monica Oudang of the Goto Impact Group, a technology group working in South-East Asia. She also pointed to the link between trust, collaboration and risk.  She spoke of an example in which Goto had been involved in cleaning up the plastic waste on an island off Sumatra where the problem had reached epidemic proportions, with no public waste collection and general apathy towards the problem among the residents. Goto had set them the challenge of working together to clean up the island. The key thing, she said, was to develop a collaborative mindset by creating relationships between them as funders, the community and the local authorities. The island now has its own recycling facility and organised refuse collection. The panellists agreed that, at bottom, trust-based philanthropy is relationship building.

And if you aren’t already doing it, wondered one participant? ‘Just start,’ said Monica Oudang. Find a level you are comfortable with and ‘go for it!’ Listen, learn and act, advised Pratima Harite.

There was also general recognition that philanthropy by no means has all the answers to the tripartite conundrum of power, trust and relationships. In another session on Day 1 on decolonising philanthropy, Elsa Marie D’Silva of Red Dot Foundation expressed this when she posed two questions: how can we equalise relations between governments, NPOs and grantees, and between donors and their constituency? How can we encourage disruptive thinking, because the sector badly needs it? Vera Safa Michalchik also struck a note of humility. The organisation she belongs to, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, is in this discussion because the sector needs support. What goes into strategy, she argued, must be grounded in the people philanthropy is helping. ‘We don’t know how to do that yet.’

Collaboration

Trust, too, is at the root of collaboration, of course. ‘If two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary,’ remarked Shloka Nath of the India Climate Collaborative, quoting her grandmother. Yet, collaboration needs to founded on clear agreement and expectations to be successful and as every philanthropy conference, to a greater or lesser extent, now acknowledges, none of the problems we face will be solved without it. As Joanne Young of Research for Impact observed, collaboration allows us to take more risk and to achieve more, but in pooling resources, do we also pool too much power? Kristy Muir of the Paul Ramsay Foundation in Australia argued the need for an ethical framework for collaboration and suggested a set of questions to encapsulate it, ranging from what is fair and for whom, are we serving the public good and does the collaboration align with my values? Shloka Nath endorsed the public good idea. In constructing the instrument, don’t lose sight of the people, she urged. Allow grantees to do the work they see, not the work you think needs to be done.

Though, in talking of collaboration, the stress is often laid on the virtues of pooling resources and abilities, it’s about more than that, argued Ruixi Hao of the Gates Foundation. It’s about how everyone involved – funders, NGOs, communities, think-tanks, government departments – can together build a community to work on an issue.

At an intersection

Two long-standing areas in which inequalities are played out are gender and health and these often intersect, with women having limited or no access to healthcare in certain circumstances. Rose Lauren Mariano of Merck & Co which is working with AVPN on access to cervical cancer care for Filipino women characterised the barriers to access as geographical, physical and economic, especially in marginalised communities, like migrant workers in Singapore. Caught between two stools, they are no longer present for immunisation programmes in their home countries and are invisible in the host country. Language, culture and education constitute further barriers. Asma Balal of Mezrab in Pakistan spoke of similar challenges. She and Dr Anindya Pradipta Susanto of Genomik Solidaritas Indonesia noted the absence of qualified practitioners in women’s reproductive health, while Balal said that myths and cultural norms meant that relations with husbands and in-laws had to be navigated. But, said Dr Susanto, women themselves could be agents of change, something which Mezrab’s experience bore out. They had recruited field educators in reproductive health who first engaged women in conversations about long-term contraception. The husbands were then brought in and couples had started using contraception. In cases where the women already had children and lived in fear of unwanted pregnancy, the results had been transformational.

Rose Lauren Mariano affirmed the importance of open discussion in order to break taboos. Who is going to care for a migrant worker with cervical cancer and who therefore doesn’t want to get tested? ‘We must talk about STDs,’ she said. By keeping the issue taboo, we simply perpetuate it.

While the issue was one requiring a cross-sector solution (this was mentioned in connection with every issue the conference raised and may hereafter be taken as read), the media has a particular role to play, says Mariano, since changes in behaviour on reproductive health happen over a long period, therefore the message needs repeating. She also stressed the need to look beyond the usual leaders. What is needed is a safe space for discussion and the correction of misinformation through as many means as possible, especially through social media. Balal, too, mentioned the need for positive role models and cited the use by Mezrab of interactive theatre in the communities where it works.

Community health

On the issue of health generally, community health workers (CHWs) have an important role to play. Over 50 per cent of the world’s population don’t have access to quality healthcare, a want glaringly exposed by the pandemic. Indonesia, for example, is a big country, said Raissa Fatimah of CISDI, with a large hard-to-reach population and, during Covid, the country’s professional healthcare sector had been unable to cope. Community healthcare workers who could talk to people in their own languages are badly needed.

Angeline Chin of the Johnson & Johnson Foundation agreed. Health is local, so interventions need to be, too. Edward Booty of reach52 (the reference is to the group’s ambition to ensure access to essential healthcare to those currently without it) sounded some notes of cautious optimism. He, too, agreed that training more CHWs is essential. Reach52 uses local volunteers to survey needs. Since health needs vary from place to place, data is critical as the responses will need to vary, too. Reach52 works with and through existing groups and networks and is now in seven countries, with the aim being to reach 13. At the outset, they created a technical platform which is now available in 11 countries. The organisation, he explained, is ‘global by design’. Angeline Chin, too, offered optimism. Johnson & Johnson had put up USD250m to support a further million CHWs over 10 years, a target which had been reached in three.

So community health workers can be a big part of the solution, but the question of how to pay for them remains. At the moment, this is fragmented among several global funders, which means no  consistent support or approach. CISDI is campaigning for them to be paid by the government, said Raissa Fatimah, but often they aren’t. However, Edward Booty believes that, as results are tracked and the value of CHWs is shown, more funding will come in.

The Asia Gender Equality Pooled Fund

Gender was also the focus of the afternoon plenary, led off by Moutushi Sengupta, AVPN’s Chief of Capital Mobilisation, who announced the first round of grantees of the Asia Gender Equality Pooled Fund which brings together AVPN, the Gates Foundation, Fondation Chanel, the Target Foundation and the Asia Gender Network. The fund is committed to raise USD25m over the next five years to support initiatives to improve the economic outcomes for women and girls in Asia. Harking back to the idea of greater trust on the part of funders, Mercedes Vargas of the Lopez Group Foundation in the Philippines, noted in an accompanying panel discussion, that the funds will be unrestricted and will encourage collaborative work. And they are needed, as Sengupta pointed out. Only 17 per cent of jobs are occupied by women and girls in the region, yet they comprise 70 per cent of the informal workforce, making them vulnerable to exploitation. The Fund has had nearly 300 applications. The eight successful ones include the Azad Foundation which provides livelihoods with dignity for resource-poor women living in urban areas in India, Badabon Sangho, a Bangladeshi women-led women’s rights organisation and Enrich Hong Kong, to provide financial literacy to migrant workers

Three awardees of the AVPN’s Constellation Awards were also celebrated – Developing Online Sales Skills to Improve Women’s Livelihoods, Manyata, a maternal healthcare project in India and Skill Impact Bond, also in India, a development impact bond which aims to train young people, especially young women to take their place in a predominantly male labour force. The awards, launched in 2020, were given a gender slant this year, said Sarika Kulkarni of the Raah Foundation and, within that, a focus on collaboration, capacity-building, a cohort-based approach and continuity of funding.

The importance of women-owned or -run businesses was highlighted, too. Graham MacMillan of the Visa Foundation noted that women see different opportunities in communities than men do and are often more sympathetic to their employees. Yet, women’s enterprises were often seen as unfundable by mainstream lenders and donors. Aparajita Agrawal said that her organisation, Value for Women, finds different reasons for reluctance among funders, from worries about perception to personal anxiety about their reputation and position in the organisation if individuals argue for, or adopt a focus on gender inclusion. Conditioning can be as big a barrier as deliberate bias, she said. To overcome this, Value for Women finds what they think they can achieve and gives them to tools to get there. On the recipient side, Angela Noronha of SecondMuse looks for alternative forms of trust for those who can’t meet standard loan guarantees – do you pay salaries punctually? Do you pay utility bills. There has to be some measures, she argued, but they don’t have to be those currently in use.

‘A door or a wall?’

Not for the first or the last time, the issue of language came up. It’s a means of communications but can often be used as a means to encrypt knowledge so only those with the key can understand it. The question for Angela Noronha is, ‘are you using it [language] as a door or a wall?’ ‘I want to make my work understandable to my family,’ said Aparajita Agrawal. That was her litmus test. Gayle Peterson of the Oxford Said Business School said something very similar in a later session. Investment, she urged, begins with people not investors. ‘We need to use language my mother would understand when we talk about impact.’

There was also some discussion of terminology in respect of donor-grantee relationships – in fact, is that label misleading, even mischievous? What should recipients be called? Most of those in the discussion urged the name ‘partner’ though Reshma Anand pointed out that it wasn’t worth overthinking the question. It’s the way you develop the relationship that matters, she said.

Lever for Change

Using money to bring in more money is almost a mantra of AVPN and Lever for Change very much occupies that terrain, as Cecilia Conrad explained. Through its open call challenges (11 over a five-year period) it has done precisely that. On the back of a USD10m award, for example, one of its awardees, Asylum Access, had been able to access a further USD2m had been able to launch a Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative to benefit refugee-led organisations globally. More importantly, the award and its subsequent additional finance represented ‘investing something that had not been invested in,’ as Sana Mustafa put it. A big grant allowed them to build partnerships, for the first time, to build a movement. But, she cautioned, it’s a process that is highly demanding of time and resources, beyond the reach of small organisations. For Care to Play, another awardee which aims to transform caregiver support for very young children in India, the results of a big grant had been similarly radical. ‘Suddenly, you can see the solution to the problem in the visible distance,’ said Tarun Cherukuri of Indus Action Initiative, the lead organisation of the Care to Play collaboration, rather than somewhere out of sight. The possibility of its realisation forced us to think about how, rather than when, he said.

Impact investing day 

For the first time, the conference featured an entire day devoted to the idea of impact investing. It’s of course an ‘elusive’ term (to use the word of International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Philipp Farenholtz) – what does it mean for AVPN? Komal Sahu, AVPN’s Chief of Sustainable Finance told us: impact investing ‘aims to generate measurable social and environmental impact as well as financial returns.’ It also rests on the belief that ‘capital can be force for good,’ she added. It offers ‘the best of both worlds,’ said keynote speaker Dato’ Amirul Feisal Wan Zahir, managing director of Khazanah Nasional, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund. Khazanah had set up an impact fund, Dana Impak in 2022 and offered three preconditions for success: first, pick partners with both passion and the right capabilities; second, identity the intended outcomes and track them, and, third, a whole-nation approach is needed to create impact at scale. He also suggested four Cs to guide delegates – coalition-building, creative solutions for complex problems, concrete measurement and context matters (an idea which could be – and often is – expressed in almost every session of almost every conference). He urged delegates, ‘use the conference to find who your allies are.’

Breaking new ground – climate and energy transition

Cliff Prior of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) noted that, while impact investing has previously gone to tried and tested development themes (healthcare, agriculture, poverty alleviation), new ones are emerging, like biodiversity, the transition to clean energy, gender and climate. He warned of the urgency of the climate question. We are closer to the edge than we think. Setting 2050 as the date to achieve net-zero is ‘way too late’. The financial system is among the most powerful forces in the world. Let’s change it, he urged, and make it harder to do wrong and easier to do right.

Amir Hamzah Azizan of the Employees’ Provident Fund in Malaysia agreed. He urged the creation of a new climate of opinion which makes non-compliance harder. We need to break down the transition required in companies into small, measurable chunks so they can see that they are on track. If they refuse to participate, disinvestment is the last resort. He is not without optimism. What are needed are clear measures, a clear taxonomy and a focus on the practical and, when it works, trust will be built. He also believes, however, that the developed world must do more to support the energy transition in developing countries.

Again, the theme of partnership emerged. Dana Impak’s RM6bn commitment was not large, said Feisal, so Khazanah needs to look for partners and invests in venture capital companies and corporations. Find the gaps, he said, and then find the groups and companies who can fill them.

Blended finance

Another elusive term – blended finance – brings together concessionary (those who are prepared to lose their money in the last resort) and commercial capital (those who aren’t prepared to lose their money) to support projects which can’t, at least initially, attract straight commercial investment. However, stressed Sanjay Gujral of Everstone Group, projects need to be sustainable and to provide some financial return eventually. But funding gaps in Asia are huge, said Marat Zapparov of Pentagreen Finance in Singapore and often the organisations needing support have no financial track record, so the package of support has to be carefully structured to make the risks acceptable to investors. The permutations, involving debt, equity or a combination of both, are many. Philipp Farenholtz cited an initiative to support a hospital on the Indian-Afghan border which, for obvious reasons, constitutes a high risk, but a potentially high return in an area with little healthcare provision. Investment in it brought together IFC and a number of private sector and bilateral partners in such a way that IFC gets its money back on a preferential basis. Most interventions require public – and/or philanthropic – and private finance. Dr Megumi Muto of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) provided an example of JICA’s blending the two to support a waste treatment project in a province of Vietnam in a phased way involving, first, the public sector, then the Asian Development Bank, bringing in private finance. In all of this, as Sanjay Gujral had noted, public money primes the pump, absorbing the loss, if any, to shield private money. Megumi Muto observed that many governments in the region are now setting up public-private partnership units, though, not surprisingly, finding concessionary capital is often the difficult first step.

Family values

Amidst discussions of the technicalities of finance, it is easy to lose sight of the reasons for employing them. Fernando Scodro of Grupo Baoba in Brazil discovered impact investing and sold his family on the idea using the money they made from the sale of the family business. His argument – if you can invest, get your money back and have a positive impact, why not do it? The difficult thing initially is what he calls ‘the knowledge gap’, in other words, explaining to family members something they know nothing about. Once everyone involved understands, it becomes easier. Intermediaries can help bridge that knowledge gap, he argued. They can also give you legitimacy in conversations with family members, so long as you find an intermediary whose views carry weight with them.

What about resolving disagreements among family members? This is often difficult, especially between generations. Marianna Vargas-Morada of the Oscar M Lopez Climate Change Centre, has some experience of that. Filipino families tend to be non-confrontational, yet unresolved disagreements can create resentment. With the help of a consultant, they had created safe channels for raising disagreements. Antonia Hui of AITi Wealth Management in Singapore agreed. Sometimes, it’s easier to bring in outside help to mediate family disputes.

The theme of Asian values was an important one in the conference as a whole and it was repeatedly urged how important families are in Asia in forming and institutionalising those values – and, echoing the point made in an earlier session, that trust has long underpinned Asian giving. ‘Our families are important to us and they are built on trust, pointed out Kathleen Chew. ‘It’s not a contract, it’s a relationship. Let’s build our philanthropy on those values.’

How are we doing? Impact measurement

Measurement remains a thorny issue. We need good measurement to provide a common understanding of what’s happening, said Dato’ Amirul Feisal Wan Zahir and admitted that this is often a work-in-progress, but seeking perfection should not prevent people from doing good in the meantime.

The jury remains out on impact measurement. While all would agree that some form of it is needed, opinion is still divided between a common set of metrics that could extend across the whole field

Sophie Sunderjee of GIIN also admitted that the challenge of impact investing is the inability to compare impact results to those of peers, though Joohee Rand of Tideline questioned whether impact investors actually want to learn, or ‘are we afraid’, she asked provocatively, to find out what the industry is good at? A survey Tideline had recently carried out suggested that many impact investors were using the SDGs as a yardstick, a point Sophia Sunderjee also made, but while 60 per cent of Tideline’s survey sample are assessing progress against the SDGs and the same percentage is monitoring impact against their own targets, a far smaller percentage is tracking the effect of the investees’ actual performance. Only 16 per cent monitor the unintended consequences of their investments and only 40 per cent are reviewing the data to make improvements. There are, in other words, large areas where present knowledge doesn’t reach. Consistent collection of quality data needs to increase, she argued. ‘If we say we are doing well but things aren’t improving, we are missing the mark.’

But is a common measurement system possible in such an ill-defined space, wondered Nicholas Khaw of Khazanah Nasional Berhad? We need to acknowledge the limits of what we can achieve, he argued. Everyone has a different view of what impact investing is, so we need to think both about what we are measuring and why. Sir Ronald Cohen, described as the ‘godfather of impact investing’, who joined the conference by video link argued, however, that ‘huge advances’ in measurement had been made and it was expected and in some cases mandatory for companies to measure and divulge the environmental and social consequences of their work.

 Tom Hall of UBS Optimus Foundation added another strand to the pro-measurement argument. If we are to achieve the SDGs, in addition to an eye-watering USD36 trillion in funding, we need a paradigm shift and for that to happen we need to create an impact economy, he argued, so the ability to measure impact remains critical.  We need, among other things, partnerships that standardise impact transparency. If you can prove impact, he argued, you can draw in money.

And philanthropy?

Judging from the reception – or at least from AVPN’s interpretation of it – it looks as though impact investing day will be a feature of future AVPN conferences. And yet….throughout the day, philanthropy had been on the sidelines. If not quite on the substitute’s bench, it was not seen as a regular first-team player in this universe. Its catalytic role was mentioned now and again, for instance, by Belinda Tanoto of the Tanoto Foundation in Indonesia who cited the example of the work Tanoto and the Gates Foundation had done on stunting which had brought in a World Bank Loan. Tom Hall, too, had noted that philanthropy’s role should be to provide first-loss capital to prime the investment pump. But he also illustrated its essentially minor role – it had at its disposal USD5 trillion in impact capital, compared to USD103 trillion in private and institutional assets and USD32 trillion in public sector funding. Granted, acting as a catalyst is an important role, and USD5 trillion is a colossal sum in anyone’s book, but one was left to ponder what shape the relationship between philanthropy, in particular, and social investment capital, in general, will take. And, for me, discussion of the intricacies of various financial instruments, important as these are to get right, felt a long way from people.

If one word stood out, though, it was collaboration. Every session, without exception, that I attended dwelt on the need for it

There were others, though, who brought the conversation back to philanthropy and its purpose. Dr Gabriel Leung of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust also pondered what philanthropists could and should do as we emerge from the pandemic? In other words,  how do we take common lessons to reinvent ourselves and devise new forms of work. He pointed out that philanthropy is always marginal and we need to think hard about how we use it and, in fact, what it is that makes philanthropy a real profession. One thing it needs to do, he argued, is to keep the global conversations going, especially in difficult times. Philanthropy’s leaders had the convening power and even-handedness to do this.

Both Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, and James Chen of the Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation, who had pioneered the production and distribution of cheap glasses to correct vision defects, spoke of the need for entrepreneurial donors. Doers and donors have to work out how to overcome problems, said Chen. The tradition, strong in Asia, of leaving it to government and just writing cheques by way of philanthropy has to be shaken off.

And, when you look beyond the mechanics, you can see the people. Many inspiring, even moving, stories were told throughout the sessions, like that of Sehat Kahani, described by its founder, Dr Sara Saeed Khurramin, a Digital Health Care platform in Pakistan which aims to democratise healthcare access using technology and a committed network of doctors. Or the refugee from Myanmar called Lalandiki, who featured on a short video, introducing the work of the YTL Foundation on the transformative power of teacher education. As a refugee, her education has suffered. How do you see your future, the interviewer asked her? ‘Blank’, she said (without self-pity or theatricality), yet she is moving forward, in part thanks to YTL’s initiative. Dato’ Kathleen Chew of the YTL Foundation said there were 200,000 registered refugees in Malaysia, 40,000 of whom are under 18. Often, only informal schools are available to them. YTL supports 11 of these, none of whose teachers initially had training and who are often refugees themselves. With the University of Birmingham in the UK, therefore, YTL has devised the Teachers for Educational Equity programmes, which equips them to teach and allows them to be recognised up to PGCEI level. This year, 84 have enrolled in 26 schools across Malaysia. The programme, said Kathleen Chew, is one that could be replicated in many other places.

‘You will see magic’

There were reminders throughout of the continued pulling power of AVPN. This year’s conference drew the biggest attendance of any so far, with 1329 delegates. Many come back year after year, testimony to the value of the event, and the organisation continues influential enough to attract major political figures in the countries where it is held as speakers and no less a one than the current Prime Minister of Malaysia, Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim was set to deliver the closing address. The VIPs’ arrival was greeted with great fanfare. We were told that they were ‘in the building,’ that ‘the doors are being closed,’ and phrases like ‘the leaders of the nation’ rang out through the PA system. Photographers swooped and scattered like agitated birds. In the event, it was the PM’s deputy, Nancy Shukri, the Minister of Women, Family and Community Development, who read out the PM’s speech. On his behalf, she urged philanthropy ‘to move beyond charity to promote justice’ and to play its part in creating a values-based economy that puts people before profit, while the Minister for Youth and Sport, Hannah Yeoh, introduced the Asian Youth Mental Well-being Fund, a partnership between the Malaysian government, AVPN, which is managing the Fund, and the Chevron Foundation, the anchoring funder, which aims to raise USD100m to address a neglected topic. She spoke of matching NGOs’ passion with funders money and, of the former, urged delegates to ‘put your money into their hands. You will see magic.’

Last words

The conference lunches comprised a series of exciting and mouth-watering dishes. It would have been impossible to sample them all. So with the conference itself. This report is a small slice. If one word stood out, though, it was collaboration. Every session, without exception, that I attended dwelt on the need for it, to the point where it is now orthodoxy. In addition to the themes outlined by Naina Batra in her opening address, there were others, which sounded a newer note: compassion, empathy, courage, even love. The attention given to trust-based giving, to donor-grantee relations and to the language in which investors and donors couch their relationships also suggested a new mood in this and other conference rooms. There was an arts showcase which opened each of the conference’s business days. One of these featured a striking multimedia piece called Imagining Ali Wallace about the work of the British naturalist in Malaysia in the 19^th century, Alfred Wallace and, in particular, his relationship with his Malay companion, Ali. In a conference which included a session on decolonising giving and whose theme was Asian solutions to global challenges, it was impossible not to reflect that, out of all the experience of colonialism, one critical result was that many Asian societies, for many years, were prevented from framing their own solutions.

The jury remains out on impact measurement. While all would agree that some form of it is needed, opinion is still divided between a common set of metrics that could extend across the whole field and a yardstick that gives an account of a specific initiative. What sticks in my mind from all the discussion of the topic is Kathleen Chew’s remark that, for her, the real impact measure is seeing the effect of her work on one person.

Another grounding remark was from Dr Gabriel Cheung of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust. Poverty alleviation was present largely by implication throughout the conference. His remark that there is ‘nothing so toxic as the toxicity of poverty,’ brought it out on to the stage. Finally, though collaboration was the most evident of Naina Batra’s initial cries throughout the proceedings, urgency was always there in the background. On the first afternoon, a storm rumbled outside, just audible in the soundproofed auditorium, like a distant, but unsettling alarm recalling Cliff Prior’s remark that reaching net-zero in 2050 will be ‘way too late.’

Andrew Milner is Features Editor at Alliance.