LEG A CY
PICK YOUR BATTLES Unsurprisingly, philanthropy in the 15 economies included in the DGI differed greatly. Noor Quek, founder and chief executive of Singapore-based multi family office NQ International says the differences tend to be based on the economic development of the country in question. “In India, for example, there is poor
sanitation in rural areas so philanthropists wanting to donate in that country will tend to lean towards basic needs. In more developed countries such as Singapore, Japan, and Korea, giving is more towards education, advanced health, the arts, and environment,” Quek says. “You would not get someone flying in to
treat cataracts in those countries because it is not necessary, but you would find that in Vietnam or Laos.” One overarching trend CAPS’ DGI found,
however, is many traditional donors in the region—tycoons giving away tens or even hundreds of millions of US dollars—are working with local NGOs to tackle poverty and inequality in the region. Peter Bennett, founder of the Hong
Kong-based Peter Bennett Foundation, says growing up in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s made him acutely aware of the disparity of wealth around him. Like other wealth holders in the region, he was taught to “give back” to the less fortunate. “Going to a local school I was taught that
we all need to be aware that we are part of a community and we need to take care of everyone in the community—it’s a lesson I believe all children from this region are exposed to and we carry that with us into adulthood,” Bennett says. After a successful career in banking and
hedge fund management, he founded his family foundation to reduce poverty. Bennett’s foundation supports 10 charity organisations in Hong Kong and six in South-East Asia, who all pitched themselves to the foundation and he personally reviewed. “We do not go out looking for funding
applications—people come to us from time to time and we will have a look and see if it is worthwhile to visit,” Bennett says. “The small number we think, ‘Wow, these guys are genuine in what they are
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trying to do and they are doing it in a way that is intelligent, thoughtful and cost efficient’— those are the ones we support.” Christopher Lavender,
director of a Hong Kong-based family foundation, says like Bennett, his foundation prefers to support local NGOs because they can be relied upon to put their fund to best use at the point of need. “We found international NGOs to be bureaucratic,
Top: Christopher Lavender, director of a Hong Kong- based family foundation, which has about 100 community projects in rural areas of developing Asian countries.
Above: Noor Quek, founder of family-office wealth advisory NQ International say the wealth management sector has been suffering from “too much salesmanship and too little stewardship.”
wasteful and sometimes rather inefficient. All the major funding problems we have had in the last 22 years have all been with NGOs because they have been somewhat distant from the actual implementation on the ground and things have gone wrong,” Lavender says. His foundation now focuses on working with small
domestic NGOs on about 100 community projects in rural areas in developing countries in South-East Asia, Nepal, Burma, India, Bangladesh, China, and Hong Kong. When finding NGOs to work with, Lavender says rather
than wading through funding applications, his foundation prefers to use personal networks and recommendations. “We do things a bit differently—we decided early on not
to have a foundation website because we did not want people ‘hitting’ on us, we wanted to be proactive and target the ones whose goals we shared,” Lavender says. “Now so many people know us, and know what we like,
and the standards we like, they refer possible partner NGOs to us.” And Lavender is not alone. Relying on personal networks
and family connections to find local charities to work with is the go-to approach in the region, Quek says. “For [Asian] philanthropists, relationships are often
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