Why philanthropy may not be the fix everyone wants it to be

Every March, the Centre on Philanthropy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD), an international group that helps governments improve economic growth and social well-being, puts out a report that a small, engaged circle of foundation officers, aid bureaucrats and development economists wait for the way stock analysts wait for a Fed announcement. This year's edition, the third in the series, was published in March with a number that raised alarm bells in the social impact sector.

Private philanthropy sent an estimated $69bn to low- and middle-income countries over the period studied, against roughly $770bn in official development assistance (ODA). Or nearly one dollar to every 11 in ODA funds. 

According to Priscilla Boiardi, there is much nuance to the way to read that number. 

Boiardi is a policy analyst in the OECD's Private Finance for Sustainable Development Unit and helps run netFWD, the Network of Foundations Working for Development, a separate body from the Centre that turns its data into rooms where foundations, development banks and governments actually talk to each other. She was in New Delhi, India for AVPN’s Global Conference 2026 and sat down for an interview with Pioneers Post.

The OECD's philanthropy numbers cover more than 500 foundations that give across borders or domestically, but by Boiardi's own account they miss most of what's happening in Indonesia, the Middle East and Thailand, and probably undercount Asia generally. As governments cut aid budgets and defence spending rises across Europe, the question of what philanthropy can and can't replace is no longer academic. Below is our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Pioneers Post: With ODA falling sharply, is philanthropy actually stepping in, or is that framing misleading?

Priscilla Boiardi: The framing is misleading, but not for the reason people assume. 

Start with scale. It's about $770bn in ODA against $69bn in philanthropy. Ten times as much, roughly. So no, philanthropy is not replacing that.

But look at what's actually inside that ODA number lately. A lot of it has gone to in-donor refugee costs and support linked to the war in Ukraine, money that in effect never leaves the donor country. Once you discount for that, the real gap looks different.

And our data has holes. 

We cover more than 500 foundations working cross-border and domestically, and it's good data, but it isn't everything. Asia is the clearest case. We have solid numbers on India, good numbers on China. We are still missing most of the giving in Indonesia, the Middle East, Thailand. 

If we had the full picture (a researcher's dream, honestly) I think we'd see philanthropy stepping up more than the headline number suggests. What I don't want is people concluding that when aid drops, philanthropy will simply fill the hole. Strategically, that's not how foundations operate. But the pie is bigger than the $69bn says it is.

What I don't want is people concluding that when aid drops, philanthropy will simply fill the hole... But the pie is bigger than the $69bn says it is.

PP: Do you expect further ODA cuts as governments focus on fiscal deficits?

PB: That's not my area, so take this as a personal read rather than OECD research. What I see in Europe is money shifting toward defence and toward domestic priorities, which is part of what's driving the aid cuts in the first place. My colleagues who actually work on ODA project further declines. The trend line isn't encouraging.

PP: The report says philanthropic funding concentrates in a narrow set of regions and sectors. Where are the blind spots, and why do they persist?

PB: Health and education dominate, and that part isn't surprising. What surprised even me, and I worked on this data collection, is climate. It's around $7bn. ODA spends roughly twenty times that on climate. That's not enough, full stop.

Part of the story, again, is what we can't see. 

There's almost certainly a lot happening at the local level on climate adaptation, run by domestic philanthropies we simply don't have data on. That's a real cost, because if we could see it, we could connect the local work to what international aid is doing and stop treating them as separate tracks.

The other blind spot is structural, not statistical. 

International foundations talk constantly about ‘locally led development’, but the actual coordination between them and domestic philanthropies is thin. Get those two groups working together properly and I think a lot of foundations would realize the money needs to move differently than it currently does.

International foundations talk constantly about ‘locally led development’, but the actual coordination between them and domestic philanthropies is thin.

PP: Domestic philanthropy in middle-income countries is expanding unevenly. What's driving the unevenness?

PB: Some of it is just measurement. We need better data in specific markets. But the deeper answer is infrastructure. We had a session on this the day before this interview, on philanthropy infrastructure specifically, and the pattern is clear. Wherever there's a strong organisation connecting civil society, philanthropy and government, giving grows in a structured way.

In Asia particularly, it is not a shortage of capital. It is not a shortage of generosity. 

It's a shortage of the infrastructure that channels that generosity somewhere useful. That infrastructure is exactly the kind of thing nobody wants to pay for. It doesn't have a ribbon-cutting. But without it, growth stalls no matter how much wealth or goodwill exists.

PP: Poor data on philanthropic flows has been a complaint for years. What's actually improved, and what still can't be measured?

PB: Two separate issues. One is definitional. 

The Centre on Philanthropy counts private philanthropy narrowly. Giving from an endowment or a dedicated budget from a corporate or foundation entity. We exclude remittances and small individual giving; other trackers, like Giving Tuesday, count those. That means part of what people would call ‘philanthropy’ in casual conversation never reaches our statistics, by design.

The other issue is regulation. 

Where there's no requirement for foundations to publish records, the data simply doesn't exist to collect. India is the clean example. The CSR law mandating roughly 2% of profits go to charity forced disclosure, and that pulled a lot of previously invisible giving into view. Mexico has something similar: a public authority that collects the data. Neither system is perfect. But an imperfect starting point beats no data at all.

Some giving will never make it into these statistics, and I've made peace with that. 

What matters more is having reliable ballpark figures from the largest players, enough to see where money is actually going.

PP: Your team collects vast amounts of data. Has that translated into better decisions for foundations on the ground?

PB: The Centre on Philanthropy is the data side, a global public good, in the jargon. netFWD is the network that uses it, and netFWD literally cannot function without it. The data is what let netFWD build the connections it has. It's part of why the French government named netFWD the secretariat of F7 this year, the first engagement group built specifically for philanthropy at that level.

Without the numbers, we'd just be another advocacy shop, and that's explicitly not our role. We don't lobby for a friendlier regulatory environment for philanthropy. What we can do is walk into a room of development finance institutions, multilateral banks and policymakers and say: here's who is already working on this issue, here's what they've achieved, here's why you should be in this room too. That argument only works because we can back it with numbers. It's also, frankly, useful for debunking the idea that philanthropy is quietly filling the aid gap. The data says otherwise, and we can show our work.

It's also, frankly, useful for debunking the idea that philanthropy is quietly filling the aid gap. The data says otherwise, and we can show our work.

PP: The report highlights a new fellowship for philanthropic leadership in Southeast Asia. What gap is it meant to close?

PB: Organisations like AVPN, the Institute of Philanthropy and the Philanthropy Asia Alliance are building exactly the kind of local infrastructure I mentioned earlier, and this fellowship is part of that: equipping a next generation of philanthropists with practical tools. I'd point you to the Institute of Philanthropy for the specifics of the program.

What it's really addressing is scale. People say ‘Asia’ the way they'd say ‘Europe’, and it isn't comparable. Europe, whatever its differences, shares enough common values to function as something close to a single market. Not yet for philanthropy specifically, but close. Asia has none of that unifying architecture. It's too big, too varied. Building a pipeline of leadership is one of the few things that strengthens the ecosystem across that variation, and it's the kind of work every serious infrastructure organisation in the region is doing in parallel.

People say ‘Asia’ the way they'd say ‘Europe’, and it isn't comparable... Asia has none of that unifying architecture. It's too big, too varied.

PP: How does Asian philanthropy's role in development finance compare structurally with Europe's or North America's?

PB: The clearest data point: in India and China, where our numbers are strongest, domestic philanthropy vastly outweighs cross-border giving. Europe and North America run the opposite way: mostly cross-border. That's the first structural difference.

The second is coordination. Europeans complain constantly that cross-border giving within Europe is hampered by weak regulation. There's a whole ‘Giving Europe’ push to fix it. Compare that to Asia, and the problem is worse: a mix of cultural differences and an even thinner cross-border regulatory framework.

What I'd give Asian philanthropy credit for is proximity. Foundations there are embedded in the local reality in a way North American funders, by design, are not. A US foundation can build that local understanding over time. An Asian foundation already has it, because it's already there.

A US foundation can build that local understanding over time. An Asian foundation already has it, because it's already there.

PP: Wealth in Asia seems to be concentrated in hubs such as Hong Kong and Singapore. What would it take for them to become genuine philanthropic capital hubs for the region?

PB: I'm not an Asia specialist, so this is drawn from conversations with people who are, colleagues at AVPN, at the Philanthropy Asia Alliance. But the pattern they describe is consistent. Wealth isn't the constraint, and generosity isn't the constraint. The constraint is the machinery that turns wealth into structured philanthropy.

That means clear regulation that makes cross-border giving straightforward, not something a family office needs a specialised lawyer to navigate. It means local infrastructure organisations that connect different philanthropic actors. It means developing people who actually know how to run a foundation, because managing wealth and running philanthropy are entirely different skills. A family that's built a fortune doesn't automatically know how to give it away well. Hong Kong and Singapore have the wealth-hub status already. What's missing is the backbone that channels it.

PP: Where do you see governments and philanthropy working well together right now, and where are they still talking past each other?

PB: I'll try to be an optimist here, which isn't my natural setting.

Last year I was at the Financing for Development conference in Seville, and what struck me was almost embarrassing. There was a pavilion for governments and a separate pavilion for everyone else, with barely any traffic between them. I came home thinking, we are talking about shrinking resources and enormous problems, and these two groups aren't even talking to each other.

Then a few months later we held netFWD's annual meeting, and the shift was real. Usually we're the ones dragging governments and development banks into the room. This time they came looking for us, driven partly by money, sure, but also by a genuine change in posture. I used to sit across from development finance institutions that would say, essentially, here's our menu, put your money in. Now they're saying they want to co-create, to listen first. That shift needs a mandate from the top of these institutions, and I'm starting to see that mandate exist.

What struck me was almost embarrassing. There was a pavilion for governments and a separate pavilion for everyone else, with barely any traffic between them.

Where I think the real work is happening is in new vehicles that blend public and philanthropic money. As part of the F7 work under the French presidency, we're building a community of practice specifically on blending and catalytic capital: foundations, DFIs, multilateral banks and development agencies in the same conversations. The interest has been real. Policymakers are starting to understand that if they want to be effective at development work, they need to be inside that network, not adjacent to it.