Tharman in conversation with Bill Gates: Philanthropy Asia Summit 2025

At the Philanthropy Asia Summit, Tharman and Bill Gates share the stage. Tharman warns that global aid is undergoing a step change — the US, Europe, and even China are pulling back, and it won't reverse soon. The answer is not despair but getting more out of every dollar. That means recipient countries building domestic capacity — digitizing tax systems, monitoring and enforcement, localizing health interventions — and philanthropic and public funds prioritizing proven interventions and scaling them. The Gavi math is concrete: every dollar given returns $54 in broader economic value, not just financial.

Gates says the Gates Foundation has given over $100 billion across 25 years, helping cut global under-five deaths from 10 million to under 5 million a year. He divides global health into three eras: 25 years of major progress; a coming 4-to-10-year squeeze, with the US tentative proposal calling for an 80% aid cut (the Foundation will lobby Congress to soften it); and a future that depends on the innovation pipeline — methods to protect girls from HIV, new vaccines, nutrition interventions, and a few dollars of postpartum bleeding drugs. Next-generation vaccines will use self-applied patches rather than needles, dramatically improving pandemic distribution. The Gates Foundation is opening an office in Singapore to partner with local philanthropists and researchers, and Breakthrough Energy is deepening ties with Temasek and GIC, with its first four fellows now working with top Singapore universities on clean energy.

Both see AI applications in health and agriculture as transformative — medical advice as good as a doctor's, delivered through a phone in any local language; real-time weather, variety, and pest advice for regional farmers. Tharman pushes a second underrated agenda: food systems. Soil moisture has dropped sharply over the past 20 years, while demand keeps rising — 1.7 billion more people in 25 years and a vast new middle class. The Philanthropy Asia Alliance's decarbonizing-rice program, with Gates Foundation involvement, has shown roughly 50% reductions in water use and 20% in methane emissions in first-year trials in India and elsewhere, with new climate-resilient seed varieties. This is philanthropy moving beyond traditional charity to solve global problems through local action.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

Welcome to Philanthropy Asia Summit. It's really a privilege to have the two of you here on stage and it is a record turnout for us this year. I think we know why everyone's here to hear you and also to learn about how you are moving philanthropic capital because we know that that's the capital that can tolerate the most risk and the world is at risk. It's a world where we are seeing rules maybe all changed, trade flows affected, aid flows affected. So if there was a mission you were on to solve one global challenge, what would it be? And if you had a hundred billion dollars, where would you place it? Climate adaptation. Ravi would be happy. nutrition. I know the Rockefeller folks will be very, very happy. Disease elimination, Gates has been with us on that. Global job crisis, you've talked a lot about that as well, President Tman.

What are the big bets and the trade-offs for philanthropy to step up? Well, I have a little less experience in spending hundred billion dollars than Bill has. I have even less, President. So, I I will address the question differently. Uh we have a problem. Uh there's a step change that's taking place in the global aid landscape. It's not just the US, it's the European countries and and more broadly you've added all up together even with China stepping up somewhat there's a significant reduction in aid monies and I don't think it's going to change soon. So we have to find ways in which we this doesn't lead to catastrophe in terms of global hunger in terms of epidemics in terms of all the maladjustments that come about in Africa in South Asia in this part of the world. It is possible.

We've got to make sure that we get more value out of every dollar spent. public money, philanthropic money, private money, none on their own is going to be enough, but all three need a step up. Not just in volumes, but in terms of effectiveness. So if you think of how we can best deploy even a billion dollars or even $500 million, I think we have to now refocus on what happens within countries and build up the domestic capacity for them to be more self-sufficient. Although many will still require significant international support through the MDBs, the multilateral development banks, through various bilateral schemes and so on, such as what we're trying to do here. But building up domestic tax capacity, building up the ability to execute budgets more effectively is an extremely important challenge and is doable.

It's actually not a hopeless case at all. Many people don't realize that in the lowest income parts of the world, several countries have significantly increased their tax collection, I'm talking about by two or three percentage points of GDP over the last decade. It's actually doable. But there's a capacity issue. There are of course political issues in some countries, but there's a capacity issues. How can we digitize tax systems? how we could how how can we build up monitoring systems, enforcement systems and so on.

So that's a very important challenge because there's a interaction between the efforts that countries make themselves and the amount of support they're going to get internationally from philanthropies from the MDBs even from other governments that still are providing some bilateral support developing capacity within countries. I spoke about tax but there are other areas Gates Foundation amongst others has funded the African CDC excellent example very wellrun some exceptional leaders a good example of how countries in Africa have gotten together to develop capabilities of their own. There are other examples to do with the whole system of training people to run agriculture more efficiently. Training PhDs, master students, monitoring systems, huge capacity development potential in Asia and in the developing world at large.

And I think that focus on the part of philanthropies as well as everyone else who's involved in thinking about the global public good has to be a priority. Okay, we hear you then. Um, President Tman, build the cap uh the capacity and then we'll be ready for the challenges whatever the challenge might be. Uh, Bill spending a hundred thousand well a 100red billion to do good. you're the one with the most experience here on this stage. Where would you put it? Yeah. So, the uh Gates Foundation is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Um and it so it was in the year 2000 uh where I first started got started and during that 25 years we've given a little bit more than a hundred billion. And when we started out, we didn't know what impact we'd be able to have. You know, we saw some really awful things.

You know, for example, because malaria was the disease only in poor countries, there was no work being done on malaria drugs or bed nets or any technique to reduce those deaths. Um because when vaccines were first designed, they weren't cost reduced. The vaccines like pneumacus roto virus uh were so expensive they were only going to the children in rich countries who were at almost no risk of dying of rotoirus and over a million kids were dying of this diarrheal disease. So we thought okay there's something that the market doesn't get because it's profit driven it does a lot of great things but saving children's lives it doesn't do well.

So we at the turn of the century over 10 million children are dying every year who are under the age of five and through not just us but you know rich countries giving to things like gaveby that bought vaccines and global fund which worked on malaria TB and HIV we've cut that child to death rate from 10 million a year to below 5 million a year uh and so it's you know pretty phenomenal.

uh part of it is the R&D piece of inventing new tools and part of it is the delivery piece and that's where the partners have been key um you know to eradicate polio uh you know we'll spend the world needs to spend another about $5 billion to get rid of that you know to eradicate malaria that's still killing uh 600,000 a year and we'll need about uh $15 billion dollars to do that uh malnutrition is this evil thing that both makes you twice as likely to die because you're just not uh as strong and even if you do survive your brain and your body never develop and so 40% of kids in subseran Africa uh you know don't achieve their potential so I go against all of those things you know in fact I'm lucky enough that over the next 10 years Um because we've grown, I'll spend another h 100red billion.

Uh but I would say and the president made this point uh you know we can save lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved. So if you if you buy bed nets, if you uh buy uh medicines for neglected tropical diseases, even a gift of a million dollars, you know, makes or even less can make a huge difference because the the field of global health even in the toughest countries is now quite mature. We measure the outcome. We know what's working, what's not working. Uh and you know, we have a a track record of success. Um, and so it's great, you know, we're having some fellow philanthropists come together on health issues in this region, uh, where people will be able to go and go and see the impact of of their generosity. You know, Bill, listening to you, I must say there's something I need to understand.

You say it's your 25th anniversary and um anniversaries full of celebration, a point of reflection and inflection, but this year has also been a year for some hard rethinks and resets for you. But you're full of optimism. Where does this optimism come from? Well, I would think of of the global health, which is the biggest area you we work in. We work in agriculture and education and some other areas as well. But 70% of our money is in the research and the delivery of global health because we saw such a tragedy and you know a market failure there. Um I would divide global health into three eras. There's the last 25 years with the great results.

uh then we have a period here which will last from 4 to 10 years where we have a lot less money and some of these poor countries particularly in Africa are very indebted and nobody's giving them the debt relief. So their financial situation uh is very very weak and as was mentioned the aid budgets uh you know in the US the tenative proposal is an 80% cut you know we'll uh go to the congress and try to convince them to not be nearly that dramatic but as Europe looks at its uh military spending and aging society and they've been the most generous you know they've been over twice just as generous as other countries, Sweden and Norway in particular, but lots of Europe, France, Germany, UK. And so we're going to have a tough period here.

And the only reason that the deaths won't go back to 10 million is that we do have innovative tools and we have a pipeline of innovative tools. We have ways of protecting girls from getting HIV. We have, you know, new vaccines. We have an understanding of malnutrition.

We have ways of stopping uh women from bleeding to death after delivery uh that only costs a few dollars of drugs and you know so our our teams you know come to Singapore and said okay let's find some of these research projects thank goodness for innovation or else uh these funding cuts could drive us back almost uh to that 10 million a year right um you know I'll be an advocate that that you know the idea of helping children survive and preventing HIV deaths you know no it's no less important today uh and so this sort of wave of not caring for other countries I I feel it'll be reversed at least I'll I'll spend uh a lot of my time trying to make the case for that okay we hear you then President Tman you know okay no just just to make your point first to add to what Bill said um and the thinking behind what you've been doing is very similar to our thinking in Singapore.

U we are faced with the shortage of resources. We've got to prioritize how it's going to be used. And apart from my point about building up tax capacity and so on in beneficiary countries, we've got to deploy philanthropic and public monies as effectively as possible. And the approach you're talking about and many of the examples you've given in Gabby and other institutions has involved first investing in innovation and piloting it on a small scale to see what works and then scaling up the proven interventions. And I think that should be our whole mindset. Pilot and scale up the proven interventions. We've got to prioritize. A reason for optimism is that that's actually working very well. If you look at Gabi, just as an example, every dollar spent, every dollar given to Gabi and spent by Gabby leads eventually to $54 of returns.

By returns, I mean not just financial returns, but broader economic returns, healthier and more productive lives for everyone. And that's actually the type of optimistic thinking that should motivate philanthropic giving as well as motivate the global public sector. We're doing this not just out of the goodness of our hearts. We're doing this not just because it is a moral cause and an important moral cause, but because we are all better off living in a world where every country has populations that lead healthier and productive lives. We are all safer and we all better off indeed. President Tman, you know, each time we listen to you, each time we hear you, we are grateful that you are the patron of Philanthropy Asia Alliance.

there's so much that needs to be done and uh your wisdom uh has spurred us on and we also know that like Bill you love innovation and innovation in Asia is something you have told us repeatedly to be scaling to be working hard on you know innovation and and um what Asia can do for the world. What do you see of that? Well, there's lots that again, Bill will have to say and there's the lots that many of you are um already doing. Um the the innovation that catches the news typically is about breakthroughs in technology which are extremely important and some we can come back to that about the potential for AI in a whole set of social interventions including agriculture. But innovation also involves organization. So for instance, if you look at India, one of the unsung successes of India is what they call the aspirational districts.

It was a very nice name for the most underdeveloped districts in India. district is quite small scale and they had a few hundred of the most underdeveloped districts and they call them aspirational districts. This was Prime Minister Mod's initiative. I think Gates together with the Pyramal Foundation and a few others helped to fund it and it gives ownership to the community developing community health workers, para nurses, having a data system which is also centralized all targeted at maternal health and health of the child in the earliest years. monitoring growth month by month, monitoring nutrition month by month and making sure that that circle is closed at the local level. I've visited some of those districts and it's working because it gives ownership to people.

Now that's an innovation in organization and the beauty of it of it is that it gave ownership and agency on the ground to the people in the village themselves who know who the mothers are who know who the absent fathers are who know who are the kids who are a little smaller than others and where something needs to be done to remedy it before they end up stunted. It's a very interesting example of innovation that I feel can spread outside India to much of the rest of the developing world. Right. Asian solutions for the globe are just as important as well. Um, Bill, you're in Southeast Asia. We know you're here on a very, very tight and busy schedule. Tell us what you're doing in Singapore, what you're going to be doing with Southeast Asia. Um, yeah. So, I'm here for two days. uh but with a a great agenda.

Uh seeing a lot of the leaders here. Um I you know I my Gates Foundation work uh is what I put the most time into but I also uh do a lot of work on climate change through a group called Breakthrough Energy and um you know both of those organizations are very excited about uh what's going on in Singapore. or the Gates Foundation is putting an office here uh to access the science to partner with the philanthropic community as in opening an office here in Singapore. Yes, Gates is opening an office an office here in Singapore. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, it's really to partner with philanthropists to partner with the research being done here. Uh likewise, Breakthrough Energy has a very deep relationship with Tamasic and a growing relationship with GIC.

Um we've done things like fund innovative uh clean energy work through what we call our fellows program. So I'll get to meet uh the first four of those and that's a growing program we're doing together with the the top universities here. I would say that Asian innovation is a part of why I'm so excited about progress we can make in health. Initially when we thought of Asian innovation, we mostly thought about low cost which is a great thing. I mean the lowest cost vaccines in the world are made in India, Indonesia, you know this region. uh but more and more the innovation is about cutting edge work you know genomic data uh that when you combine it with the AI will help us understand what is the disease prevalence what differences are there across all the diverse populations here.

Um, you know, one of the scenarios we have for AI is that just talking to your phone in your whatever language you use, you should get medical advice that's as good or better than you would get if you had a doctor with you all of the time. And so that health scenario uh will be enabled by AI. uh the farmers in this region, you know, they need advice about weather and which variety and plant disease. Uh so we're piloting using AI to give them advice where it'll know about their soils and their uh land and what the pricing uh looks like. And so it's the innovation pipeline, a lot of which uh will be developed in this region. Uh that means that even with these aid cuts, although we'll try and get them reversed, um I do see even the toughest challenges like malaria, HIV, I do see us being able to solve those uh in the next 25 years.

You know, Bill, we have to ask you to add deni to that list. You talk about malaria, which is definitely very important. uh but within Southeast Asia and really with the tropicalization of uh the world, you know, getting warmer, we're seeing deni in other parts of the world as well. Will you add that uh to the solutioning as well? Yeah, we've been a a big funer. We were the ones who funded this Wakia work down in Australia. That was uh Gates uh grand challenge back in 2003. We jo jointly funded the work in Jakarta uh with an Indonesian family foundation who funded that roll out that has benefited. It doesn't completely get rid of the deni but it drops the level pretty dramatically by about 70%. Yeah. And we have uh some of our vaccine uh partners uh including uh uh Seni and Tada who've worked on vaccines. the vaccines.

We're going to need a a next generation vaccine to completely solve it. The a deni vaccine turns out to be quite challenging, but it is possible. We funded the early development of this mRNA. And so, a lot of the new vaccines will be reformulated. And instead of using a needle, which a lot of people don't like, we're just going to have a little patch that you can self- apply and it doesn't have any pain or uh so we hope uh whether it's just in general to get higher vaccination rates or particularly in a pandemic, the fact that you could distribute this thing and just self- apply it rather than going into the uh health care uh would be pretty dramatic.

and and so there's a lot of lessons coming out of the COVID pandemic uh that uh will help us with the current infectious diseases but also would allow us to deal far far better uh when and sadly it's not if it's when uh the next big uh pandemic challenge comes around. you know, we work very closely uh with uh the Gates team and and I know many of them are here as well. Hari, Anaf, Anu, uh Jamal and then you know so many of them um come back and forth as well. Tonglay from your uh SIF team, Arin Gupta from your blended um uh finance team uh as well and they listen closely. They they've listened closely. So, you know, I'm sure Denge will be part uh of what's going on. They're staying on afterwards because we're going to have a session uh just on that as well.

I mean, it it sounds like we're asking for it, but it's a it's something that we um really um go through quite a fair bit in Southeast Asia as well. It'll be great to see the malaria problem maybe broaden into a mosquito challenge for you. Yeah, for some of our diseases, it sounds awful to say this, but we're almost glad there's some cases in rich areas like Deni and Singapore. uh I mean it's a terrible thing to say but uh you know the it means that the priority uh you know for doing that uh you know HIV it's tragic that it's everywhere but part of the reason a lot of global health things like uh PEPFAR global fund they got created because the citizens in the US could see the tragedy of HIV and when you said should anyone in the world die just because we don't have the $100 a year to buy these ARV medicines.

We managed uh at least in that time uh to get a strong bipartisan uh response to that. That's one of the things that's at risk and we're going to have to re explain to uh US politicians why they should stay engaged in that.

when you have a disease like malaria or malnutrition that's really only in the poor countries then we really need to get people to come and see it uh you know of course here in Singapore you know the range of income levels and disease burdens just in the region is quite dramatic you know uh you know Papa New Guinea uh there's there's still uh some significant burdens and of course this is a region we'd love to get rid both deni and and malarian have that be an example so the rest of the world can do the same thing indeed and whatever we ask for through philanthropy Asia alliance we ask not only for Singapore but we ask for the region because that's important to us fantastic President Tman you know um we've been following your speeches uh over the years um around philanthropy as well and really it was at the inaugural PAS that you talked about the move the need for that move from checkbook philanthropy to catalytic philanthropy.

Have you seen philanthropists pick up on that idea? I think if you look at our new landscape of philanthropy, including the family officers, there's a generation of philanthropic leaders now um who really want to see impact in what they're doing. And that impact is not completely dislodged from looking at financial returns but they want more than that. They want to see social impact. They want to see a broader economic impact on the lives of beneficiaries. So I think that that thinking uh has shifted and it's uh it's important now to develop the methods that allow us to measure impact so that to go back to the earlier point we can put more resources into proven intervent inter interventions and scale them up.

You know, you speak of the uh shift in generation and from what we're seeing through some of our efforts throughout the Tamasic trust ecosystem. We find it very interesting that the younger um well not quite philanthropists but maybe you know would be philanthropists through their own wealth management u platforms they they save they invest or at least when I was growing up you know if I was savvy about my personal finances I would save well I would invest well and that was what my platform was all about. We have found that the uh there are the wealth platforms of today that are including philanthropy in it.

The young people whom they have whom they're trying to attract onto their apps, their wealth apps are asking for philanthropy options to be part of it because they know to be savvy today as a um in your personal finances is to give as well as to save. So that's been an interesting shift that we've seen uh as well. But how do we get more bill of the young people at least to to see their 1 million their 10,000 or even their $100 is making a difference. Not everyone moves a hundred billion. Yeah. Well, um you know the Gates Foundation is trying to encourage plan 3 both um by people of great wealth. uh you know, we have a thing called the giving pledge that we have about uh 300 people who've committed to give away the majority of their wealth uh during their lifetime or through their will.

And so that's kind of a community, but we also uh you know there's a day in the United States called Giving Tuesday, you know, where we really talk about help your local teacher, help your local food bank, or you know, help us succeed with polio eradication where, you know, even $10 donations. You know, we say a bed net that protects a child, a vaccine that protects a girl from cervical cancer, you know, that's actually $2 uh uh to buy that vaccine. In the US, philanthropy is about 2% of the economy. So, you know, small compared to private sector and government, but globally, it's it's about a half a percent. And so the US uh is a little bit ahead on that. Um and it's interesting to think, okay, you know, why is that? Is it the tax incentives? That may be part of it. Is it that we know the government can't solve all problems?

Uh and so there's this kind of self-reliance local community groups. Uh you know, that's part of it. We'd like to really spread this idea, uh you know, of very big giving. you know the most honorable givers are those who are actually uh making some sacrifice and of course you know I make when I give you know I'm making no sacrifice at all uh and you know so it's it's very praiseworthy but helping people know that the money will be well used uh and they get a sense I thought in the digital area philanthropy would take off even more um as yet we've 've only seen that in a very modest way. And so, uh, I still believe we can do it because we can connect the donor and have them see the outcome. You know, we can't get everybody to go, uh, to the, uh, site of the actual work.

And it's in those poor areas that the impact per dollar is dramatically higher. I'm not saying all philanthropy should be that, but that's, you know, I'm doing that with um 90% of my resources. In the US, about 5% of philanthropic giving leaves the country. Um, so a lot of it is domestic, which is which is just fine. Yeah. President, if you Well, I think there's there's another uh large opportunity for philanthropy in this part of the world. um which is moving beyond traditional charity towards addressing the largest problems that the region faces and the world's faces through local action. And one of the least notice large problems has to do with food systems and nutrition. In fact, it's a looming crisis that isn't focused on very much because it's a it's a slow burning crisis.

We have reached the limits of how we've produced food in the past both by ordinary small holder farmers as well as in industrial agriculture. We've reached the limits because it is too large a source of greenhouse gas emissions. We can't keep encroaching into natural forests and other natural ecosystems. And also because soil health is not has deteriorated very significantly. In fact, there's been a step reduction in moisture in the soil over the last 20 years that now makes the soil much more susceptible to droughts, much less able to be a sink for carbon and much less able to grow plants with a reasonable yield. So, we have a real problem in how we grow food in future. And on the demand side, we have the reverse. We have an explosion of demand because of population growth. We have about 1.

7 billion people who are going to be part of the world in the next 25 years. In fact, in the next 10 years, we have about 800 million people. And we have a much larger increase in food and nutrition demand because a large group of poor and lower middle- inome people are now going to become middle class and aspire to become middle class. So, food demand is going to go up. So supply is going to be constrained and demand is going up and we have to revolutionize food systems. We need a new green revolution and a truly green revolution that uses less water, allows more moisture to stay in the soil, involves less methane emissions that come from rice especially and less greenhouse emissions in general and that still gives farmers a better yield and it's possible.

One of the initiatives of philanthropy Asia alliance uh is decar decarbonizing rice. I think Gates Foundation was also involved. There have been large scale trials now in India and several other parts of the region that have been extremely uh productive. In fact, in the in the very first year, we've already found very significant improvements in farmers yields, reduction in water requirements, about 50% reduction in water, and about 20% reduction in methane emissions, new seed varieties, new strains. In other words, they're more climate resistant resistant to droughts and floods. Very importantly, they just reduce less water. They they involve less water use. Indeed that's so this is a large challenge.

It involves all of us and if we don't solve it first many more people in the world are going to go hungry and everyone else is going to see an increase in the cost of living because food prices are going to go up. So we really need to focus on this transform how rice is cultivated in order that farmers can still have good good incomes and populations can have good nutrition including the poor especially and the cost of living doesn't need to go up. Thank you President Dun Bill before we go thank you for opening the office in Singapore. What do you want to see from this region where innovation and philanthropy is concerned? Well, we're already seeing a lot of great philanthropists here.

Um, you know, and I think, uh, people are very family oriented and so, you know, having something even beyond whatever the family business is, having the family philanthropy, uh, get the family members working together and be proud about what uh, they're able to achieve. you know, I think we're seeing uh a a big increase in that and so, you know, we're excited to be here and and learn together. We're excited to have you here, Bill Gates. Thank you, President Talman. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much. [Applause]