Quantedge Foundation pledges $50m to social mobility, including new Bukit Merah collaboration space

SINGAPORE – $50 million will go to advancing social mobility in Singapore over the next 10 years through initiatives funded by philanthropic organisation Quantedge Foundation Singapore, its chief executive Xie Yao Quan said on Oct 28.

These include a new collaborative space in Bukit Merah for organisations to work together on the issue, and increased funding for social sector innovators.

Quantedge Foundation will also work on a six-year longitudinal study of more than 3,000 lower-income households in Singapore to see how social networks influence mobility.

Xie announced this at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the organisation – which is the philanthropic arm of Singapore hedge fund Quantedge Capital – held at ITE College Central.

Education Minister Desmond Lee, who was the guest of honour, said Singapore has made encouraging progress on social mobility, but sustaining it is becoming harder as the country matures.

The Government is committed to working on the issue so that opportunities remain open to all, but cannot do it alone, he said in a speech.

“We need partners like Quantedge Foundation, who bring networks, expertise and fresh ideas, to extend our reach on the ground and strengthen our ecosystem of support,” he said.

The new space is set to open in 2028 and will be known as the Quantedge Opportunity Lab or QOLAB.

Located in the former Jalan Bukit Ho Swee Community Centre, it will bring organisations working to advance social mobility together with others who support them, said Lee.

“It will be a shared space designed to spark interaction, collaboration and learning across organisations,” said Lee. Plans are for it to house 250 people.

The idea is for QOLAB to help promising projects scale up, Xie told reporters in an interview before the event.

“Excellent pilots are not enough. Excellent pilots that just remain as pilots are not enough to meet the systemic social mobility challenge,” he said.

On the initiative to fund innovators in the social service sector, Xie said it is an improvement on something Quantedge Foundation already runs known as the philanthropreneur-in-residence (PIR) programme.

Under the expanded programme, it will provide each PIR up to $2 million in funding over five years, and is prepared to support exceptional ones for up to eight years.

It will also go beyond funding to provide them with support in building up their services, from how to select board members to designing their organisations.

On the third initiative – the study – Xie said the aim is to create a high-quality, representative and novel data set that will undergird and inform social mobility research in Singapore.

“We hope that this data set will be able to enable the development of models that can predict and simulate different drivers of social mobility, and so these models can inform, for example, particular interventions.”

The initial $50 million is just the start. It comes after the foundation gave close to $40 million to social mobility initiatives in the past decade.

Xie said Quantedge Foundation is prepared to commit “up to a few multiples” of $50 million if needed, to help close what he called a “systemic opportunity gap” in Singapore’s society.

He cited stats released by the Ministry of Finance in a February paper that showed signs that social mobility is slowing in Singapore.

The paper showed that the proportion of children born to fathers at the bottom 20% of incomes who make it to the top 20% of income earners as adults had fallen for younger cohorts of Singaporeans.

“If we leave the issue as it is and just leave things on their own, that proportion will continue decreasing and mobility will continue slowing,” said Xie, who is also MP for Jurong Central, and deputy speaker of Parliament.

As Singapore continues to succeed economically, parents who have done well naturally pass their resources and advantages to their children, he said.

“The gap in opportunities for children born to different backgrounds will only widen – as borne out by the statistics.”

These gaps are seen across various segments of society including the education system, but also in systems outside schools like the enrichment industry, he said.

That is why Quantedge Foundation hopes to create a “system-level approach” to tackling the issue through its initiatives, said Xie.

It will be extremely difficult to achieve total equality of opportunities, Xie acknowledged.

“We should try to at least lean against the trend and hopefully thwart the erosion of social mobility.”