The wealthiest families around the globe commit billions of dollars annually to philanthropic endeavours. Yet there’s little comparable data on what they fund, how they organise their philanthropy, and how they seek to create change. This report provides a landscape analysis of how the world’s wealthiest give based on the practices of the 10 wealthiest individuals and families across 20 economies spanning Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
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This family philanthropy report builds on two previous Bridgespan research reports taking an in-depth look at global philanthropy: High-Impact Philanthropy: Giving Better Across Asia and the World and High-Impact Approaches to Corporate Giving.
These reports included lists of the largest 20 global and Asian institutional and corporate givers. We have updated both lists. See “The Largest Institutional Philanthropies Expand Giving Amidst Global Challenges,” and “The Largest Corporate Funders Significantly Increase Their Giving.”
We found that annual giving by the 20 largest global institutional funders grew by 42 percent between 2020 and 2024. Over the same period, the 20 largest global corporate givers increased their average annual giving by 80 percent.
As our new report explains, family wealth is the wellspring for most giving, whether personal, institutional, or corporate.
This focus on family giving marks the third year of The Bridgespan Group’s High-Impact Philanthropy Series, supported by our Funders Council – the Institute of Philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. This research was done in conjunction with Bridgespan’s project on family philanthropy, the subject of High-Impact Family Philanthropy: What Makes Family Giving Distinctive.
Across regions, the wealthiest families share many of the same philanthropic behaviours. The dataset includes 186 families: 115 are based in Asia, and 71 are from other regions; 96 are from high-income economies, and 90 are from middle-income economies.
Where differences do appear, national income often explains as much as geography. For instance, families that administer their own programmes (as opposed to giving grants to nonprofits) are more common in middle-income economies.
Key findings show that:
- Compared with other regions, Asian family philanthropy is distinctive for its integration with business, its engagement with government, and its reliance on trust-based networks.
- About 94 percent of Asia's wealth remains under founder or second-generation control, compared with approximately 85 percent in high-income economies outside Asia.
- Business-linked giving is the dominant model in Asia (used by 95 percent of families in middle-income Asia and 80 percent in high-income Asia), and far less common in other regions of the world (45 percent in middle-income economies and 28 percent in high-income economies).
- Education, health, and support for vulnerable populations are the top three issue areas supported by the majority of families studied. However, Asian families are more likely to support elderly care, religion, and sports, while families from other regions more frequently fund science and technology (including AI-related initiatives).
- Few families report the outcomes – such as learning gains or graduation rates – of their work, but most report outputs – such as number of schools built or teachers trained.
Perhaps the most striking finding is that context often matters more than geography. Across dimensions such as international giving, multiyear funding, and field-building, high-income Asian families often resemble their high-income peers worldwide more closely than they resemble families in middle-income Asia.
As Asian wealth continues to grow, governments – especially in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates – are implementing policies to attract family offices. In all three, philanthropy has become a feature of how governments attract family offices and anchor long-term private capital. Families deciding where to base their wealth increasingly weigh not only tax incentives, but also how effectively they can structure and deploy their giving.
