What are the best charities in Hong Kong? 值得捐款的機構
- Kenneth Chan
- Jun 24
- 13 min read
Note: The research in this post was done by a human, not by AI. AI was used in some places to tidy up the writing.
This is cross-posted from givewise.org.hk, where it is in 3 parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Introduction
The answer to this question is not as straightforward as it may at first appear. As we explain later, a major challenge in Hong Kong is that the lack of a systematic requirement to publish detailed evaluations makes it genuinely hard to tell which local charities are most effective.
The most effective charities for Hong Kong donors are usually those that (a) follow strong evidence on what works and (b) direct resources to the people and animals who can benefit the most per dollar, which often means supporting work in lower-income countries as well as high‑impact local initiatives.
While GiveWise’s top giving recommendations are therefore overseas, this post addresses a common question by our local community by tackling the question of which are the most promising giving opportunities in Hong Kong.
What do we mean by “effective”?
When we talk about an effective charity, we are mainly asking: “How much good does each extra dollar actually do?” This is usually called cost‑effectiveness: impact per dollar, not just total size or good intentions. The gap between “average” and “best” can be enormous: some global health programmes appear to do 50-1000 times more good per dollar than typical rich‑country charities.
In practice, this means looking at factors such as:
What concrete outcomes change (e.g. lives saved, years of vision restored, children learning to read).
How cheaply those outcomes are achieved compared with other options.
How strong the causal evidence is (e.g. randomized trials vs anecdotes).
Whether the charity can scale further without quickly running out of the most cost‑effective opportunities.
Why the strength of the evidence matters
Not all evidence is equally informative for deciding where to donate. The hierarchy of evidence (systematic reviews and RCTs at the top, then observational studies, then case studies and anecdotes) matters because intuitive ideas of what should work often fail when tested rigorously. Basing donations on the strongest available evidence is the best way to avoid accidentally funding nice‑sounding but low‑impact projects.
Why many of the best opportunities are overseas
For donors in Hong Kong, a key fact is that the most cost‑effective ways we currently know to help others are usually in less economically developed countries. This is mainly because:
The baseline is much lower: preventing blindness, death from malaria, or extreme poverty in low‑income countries can often be done at a few hundred to a few thousand HKD per major outcome.
Labour and delivery costs are much cheaper, so the same donation funds more staff time, medicines, or materials.
Many of the most effective health and anti‑poverty interventions have already been tested in these contexts and provide things we take for granted in the developed world (e.g. vitamin A supplementation, malaria prevention, deworming).
This does not mean that no Hong Kong charity is good, or that local work is unimportant. It just means that if your goal is to maximise lives saved or suffering reduced per dollar, you should strongly consider at least some overseas giving through highly‑vetted global health and animal‑welfare organisations.
What are our top recommended charities?
For global health and poverty, we currently recommend giving via the GiveWell All Grants Fund and a small set of top‑rated charities, all of which you can donate to through GiveWise Hong Kong.
Read more about these opportunities on our Best Charities page.
“Does that mean existing local charities are bad?” (No.)
Supporting highly cost‑effective work abroad and supporting local initiatives in Hong Kong are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely reasonable to give a substantial share of your donations to the most cost‑effective global health or animal‑welfare charities worldwide, and also support a smaller local portfolio of promising Hong Kong‑related projects that directly help people here.
However, a major challenge in Hong Kong is that it is genuinely hard to tell which local charities are most effective. There is no single charity commission or centralised registry with standardised impact reports, and oversight is split across many government departments. Most charities are only required to submit limited financial information, and there is no systematic requirement to publish detailed evaluations of programme results. As a result, even well‑intentioned donors cannot easily compare which organisations create the most health, education, or welfare impact per dollar.
This lack of transparency and rigorous public evidence is one of the key obstacles to Hong Kong people feeling confident about donating. Surveys and commentary from local governance and philanthropy experts note that public trust in the charity sector is not particularly high, largely because people are unsure where their money actually goes and what outcomes it buys. Many large organisations are structurally complex and relatively opaque: they may publish general annual reports but provide very limited granular information about how programmes are performing, what has worked or failed in the past, and how they adjust based on data.
That does not mean these charities are doing a bad job. It often just means we do not have enough information to know either way. From an impact‑focused perspective, the problem is that most charities do not yet provide the kind of transparent, rigorous evidence that would let donors assess effectiveness with confidence.
Start with the evidence
Most charities are founded in a way that feels natural and virtuous. Someone sees a problem, such as homelessness, childhood illiteracy, environmental damage, and is moved to act. They design an intervention based on their best judgment, recruit supporters, raise funds, and begin. Only later, if at all, do they try to measure whether what they are doing is actually working.
This is understandable, and empathy is not itself the problem. The world needs people who are moved to act. The challenge is that empathy alone is not a reliable guide to what works. Without grounding in evidence, even the most motivated founders can end up running programmes that are weaker than the best available alternatives, often without any easy way to know.
We think there is a better way to build a charity. One that reverses the process entirely.
Instead of starting with a cause you care about and then figuring out what to do, the more effective approach is to start with the research: look at the body of evidence on what interventions already work, identify which are most cost-effective and yet underserved, and then build an organisation specifically to implement one of those interventions well. The cause and the intervention are chosen because the evidence says they are among the highest-impact opportunities available, not because they happen to match a founder's personal experience.
This is the model pioneered by Charity Entrepreneurship, a London-based organisation that each year dedicates thousands of hours to systematically analyse hundreds of potential intervention ideas. From that research, they identify a small number (typically three to five) that represent the most promising opportunities for new charities to implement. Founders who go through their incubation programme then choose from this pre-vetted shortlist, receive training and co-founder matching, and launch with seed funding of up to US$200,000. Since 2019, more than 50 charities have been founded this way, and several are now recognised by evaluators such as GiveWell and Founders Pledge as among the most cost-effective organisations in their fields.
The contrast with the conventional model is stark. In the traditional approach, effectiveness is an afterthought, merely something to verify once the organisation is already up and running. In the research-first model, effectiveness is the founding premise. You begin with the question "what does the evidence say works best?" and build everything else around the answer.
This matters for Hong Kong for two reasons. First, it offers a framework for evaluating existing local charities: to what extent is their work grounded in strong evidence, rather than inherited assumptions about what ought to help? Second, and more importantly, it suggests what new philanthropic initiatives in Hong Kong could look like. Rather than founding yet another charity based on a compelling personal story or an untested idea, founders and funders could instead ask: what interventions are already backed by rigorous evidence from elsewhere in the world, and how could they be adapted and implemented here?
The projects in the next section are informed by exactly this logic.
Part 2: Evidence‑backed projects we’d love to see in Hong Kong
The projects below are not existing charities in most cases but high‑impact models, already backed by strong evidence elsewhere, that could be implemented or scaled in Hong Kong. This list is not meant to be exhaustive; it’s a starting point for funders, practitioners, and policymakers looking for unusually effective opportunities.
1. Low‑sodium salt to prevent strokes and heart disease
Hong Kong’s average salt intake is far above the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation. The Report of Population Health Survey (PHS) 2020–22 by the Department of Health found a daily salt intake of about 8.4 g (around 3,400 mg sodium), exceeding WHO’s recommended under 5 g (2,000 mg sodium), with 83.9% of the population consuming too much salt. Conversely, 90.9% of the population had inadequate potassium intake. Both are risk factors for chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure.
Excess sodium intake is a major driver of high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases, which together cause an estimated 1.89 million deaths per year worldwide.
WHO now strongly recommends reducing sodium intake as one of the most cost‑effective ways to prevent non‑communicable diseases, estimating at least a 12:1 return for every US$1 invested in scaling sodium‑reduction interventions. It also explicitly suggests replacing regular table salt with lower‑sodium, potassium‑enriched salt substitutes where appropriate. Because cardiovascular disease is widespread and salt reduction is extremely cheap, even modest population‑level reductions in sodium intake could yield very large health gains per dollar in Hong Kong.
Promising project directions could include:
Subsidising or bulk‑purchasing low‑sodium salt and distributing it through community health centres, elderly homes, and public institutions.
Partnering with large food manufacturers and restaurant chains to switch to potassium‑enriched salt in processed foods and catering.
Running public education campaigns emphasising that most people consume too much sodium and that low‑sodium salt is a simple, evidence‑based switch.
2. In‑ovo sexing to reduce egg‑industry animal suffering
Hong Kong is one of the highest egg‑consuming places in the world. In 2024, Hong Kong residents consumed about 28.3 kg of eggs per person per year. With a medium egg weighing around 50g, that is approximately 566 eggs per HK person annually—almost 2 eggs per day, second only to the Netherlands globally and just ahead of mainland China. That translates into roughly 4.26 billion eggs consumed per year in Hong Kong alone, or about 11.7 million eggs per day.
Given that a typical hen lays around 330 eggs in her lifetime, one day of Hong Kong egg consumption requires the lifetime production of more than 35,000 hens, and one year requires the lifetime production of about 12.9 million hens.
Because male chicks of egg‑laying breeds do not produce eggs and are not economically viable for meat, the industry standard is to cull them shortly after hatching.
This implies roughly one male chick killed for every female layer hen, so Hong Kong’s consumption is associated with about 35,000 male chicks killed per day, approximately 248 thousand per week and 12.9 million per year.
In‑ovo sexing technologies allow producers to determine the sex of an embryo early in incubation and avoid hatching male chicks altogether. Consumer research in Australia suggests people are willing to pay far more than the additional cost of in‑ovo sexing—over 13 times the added cost—once they understand that it prevents chick culling.
Since 66% of Hong Kong’s eggs are imported from mainland Chinese producers, there is a large regional supply chain where standards and practices could potentially be shifted.
Promising project directions could include:
Funding consumer research in Hong Kong and mainland China to test willingness to pay for “no‑kill” eggs produced using in‑ovo sexing.
Supporting advocacy campaigns that encourage retailers and major food service companies in Hong Kong to commit to sourcing eggs from suppliers using in‑ovo sexing once commercially available at scale.
Working with producers and regulators to pilot and then mandate in‑ovo sexing, thereby preventing millions of male chicks from being killed every year.
3. Higher tobacco taxation and stronger tobacco control
Smoking imposes a heavy burden in Hong Kong. Government figures estimate that smoking causes nearly 7,000 deaths per year locally, including around 700 deaths of non‑smokers from second‑hand smoke exposure. The associated healthcare costs and productivity losses are roughly HK$5.6 billion annually, and the Hospital Authority projects that chronic disease incidence could rise by 50% over 20 years to about 3 million cases by 2039 if trends continue.
Despite recent tax increases, Hong Kong’s tobacco tax rate is still below WHO’s recommended level. The WHO considers high tobacco taxation one of the most cost‑effective public health “best buys” because it reduces smoking prevalence and discourages initiation, especially among young people.
Given the scale of smoking‑related mortality and the strong evidence base for taxation and comprehensive tobacco control, this area likely offers very high health impact per dollar spent. Internationally, groups have supported work similar to what could be done here: for example, Smoke Free Israel has been the subject of dedicated cost‑effectiveness research, suggesting strong returns from tobacco‑control advocacy.
Promising project directions could include:
Advocacy and technical support for raising tobacco excise taxes further toward or beyond WHO benchmarks.
Tightening restrictions on marketing, packaging, and flavours, backed by public campaigns on the harms of tobacco and nicotine products.
Using additional tobacco tax revenue specifically to fund other cost‑effective health interventions (e.g. salt reduction, cardiovascular screening), creating a virtuous cycle.
4. Differentiated instruction and remedial learning in low‑income schools
High‑quality evidence from multiple countries shows that tailored remedial education for students in the early grades (roughly Primary 1–3) can dramatically improve basic literacy and numeracy at low cost. Randomized trials of remedial learning programmes (delivered either by trained teachers or even by volunteer teaching assistants) consistently find large learning gains when instruction is adjusted to pupils’ actual level rather than just the curriculum grade level.
These programmes typically:
Assess each child’s current skills and group them by learning level rather than age alone.
Provide targeted sessions focused on foundational reading and maths for those who are behind.
Can be delivered during or after school, and sometimes by lower‑cost staff or volunteers with appropriate training.
In Hong Kong, low‑income families and schools face their own educational inequities, especially around language, reading, and numeracy. Adapting differentiated‑learning models to the local curriculum, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, could be a highly effective way to improve long‑term educational and life outcomes.
A promising project might fund:
Design and piloting of a differentiated‑instruction programme in selected low‑income primary schools, with simple assessments.
A rigorous evaluation (ideally an RCT) to test effects on reading and maths outcomes.
If results are strong, advocacy and technical support for system‑wide scale‑up.
5. Five‑minute phone calls to boost parental engagement
A strikingly simple intervention with good evidence from other contexts involves brief, structured phone calls from teachers to parents to update them on their children’s progress and behaviour. A study of such a programme found that short calls around 5 minutes improved homework completion and class behaviour among students whose families had lower baseline engagement.
Teachers share specific positive observations and concrete suggestions, helping parents feel informed and empowered and making it easier for them to support learning at home. The intervention is very low‑cost and can be targeted to students most at risk of disengagement.
A promising project might:
Pilot a structured “5‑minute phone call” model in schools serving low‑income communities, with training and scripts for teachers.
Randomise which classes or students receive the calls to rigorously measure effects on attendance, homework completion, and grades in local conditions.
Work with the Education Bureau to incorporate effective elements into standard practice if results are positive.
Part 3: An actual list of Hong Kong organisations
The following Section 88 (tax-exempt) organisations either already operate using interventions with strong evidence behind them, or direct Hong Kong donations to overseas programmes that independent evaluators view as effective. Again, this list does not claim to be exhaustive or definitive, merely what we are currently aware of as of the date of this article’s publication.
These organisations are not all equally cost‑effective, and some may have particular programmes that are much more impactful than others. However, for Hong Kong donors seeking Section 88 options that are plausibly well above average on impact per dollar, this list is a decent starting point. Further analysis would be valuable.
Organisation | Why it looks promising (impact‑focused lens) |
The Good Food Institute (GFI) is an international nonprofit creating practical solutions to end factory farming by accelerating the development of alternative proteins for a more compassionate food system and sustainable world. Giving Green and Animal Charity Evaluators both recommend the Good Food Institute as a top charity. | |
Runs poverty‑reduction and livelihoods programmes in the Philippines, with careful monitoring; recommended in Christian circles as a comparatively impactful faith‑aligned option. Further analysis would be valuable. | |
Works to end avoidable blindness through cataract surgery and other eye‑health services in low‑ and middle‑income countries, with typical cost per surgery in some settings around a few hundred HKD. The Life You Can Save recommends Fred Hollows as a high‑impact charity based on the large and measurable gains in quality of life per dollar. Further analysis based on the Hong Kong context would be valuable. | |
Another major eye‑health organisation focused on preventable blindness; uses mobile eye hospitals, training, and surgery in poorer countries. Certain programmes likely have strong cost‑effectiveness, though this may vary by context. Further analysis would be valuable. | |
Funds eye‑care “hospital trains” and related services that deliver cataract and other surgeries in rural mainland China. Given the relatively low cost of cataract operations and large benefits, these programmes are likely to be highly cost‑effective. Further analysis would be valuable. | |
A Hong Kong‑based foundation that channels local philanthropic funds into health projects in Belt and Road countries, including vector‑control measures to prevent dengue. GX and collaborators have published high‑quality research in venues like The Lancet on new dengue‑prevention methods, indicating a serious evidence‑based approach to programme design and evaluation. Further analysis would be valuable. | |
Give2Asia’s cross‑border work includes low‑cost, scalable health interventions in rural parts of Asia, such as low‑sodium‑salt programmes for hypertension prevention. Donors can, in principle, earmark support for projects with strong evidence bases and high expected impact. Further analysis from the Hong Kong context would be valuable. | |
Older analyses by organisations like Giving What We Can and GiveWell note some scope for cost‑effective work though concluded not to recommend at the time. Oxfam has a relatively transparent series of effectiveness reviews for its programmes. Impact likely varies widely across projects, so donors may wish to focus on global health and social‑protection programmes with strong evaluations. Further analysis from the Hong Kong context would be valuable. | |
The Hong Kong Jockey Club’s “Project Lift” is piloting an “urban graduation” approach in Hong Kong, inspired by the graduation programmes in low‑income countries that RCTs have shown can significantly increase income and assets over time. Local partner Voyage is conducting an RCT on the Hong Kong adaptation, which is unusually rigorous by local standards and may reveal a scalable, high‑impact model for urban poverty alleviation. |
Non‑Section 88 organisations likely to be highly effective
Some of the most leveraged work from an impact perspective is advocacy and movement‑building, which often does not fit neatly into standard charity categories or Section 88 status. Because these organisations work mainly through research, advocacy, and industry transformation rather than direct services, their impact is harder to measure but can be extremely large if they help trigger structural changes in policy or business practices.
A few non‑Section 88 organisations that look promising from an effectiveness standpoint include:
Generocity
Website: https://www.generocity-hk.org/
Generocity advocates for Hong Kong government resources to be directed toward highly cost‑effective overseas direct aid. By influencing public‑sector allocations, such advocacy can potentially move orders of magnitude more money than an individual donor ever could, multiplying impact.
Planet For All
Website: https://www.planet4all.org/
Planet For All focuses on improving farmed animal welfare (e.g. for chickens and fish) through corporate and policy campaigns. Given the number of animals affected and the low cost of many corporate‑commitment campaigns, this kind of work is often among the most cost‑effective ways to reduce suffering per dollar.
Good Growth Co
Website: https://www.goodgrowth.io/
The Good Growth Co. conducts research and design to accelerate ethical and sustainable food systems in Asia, including alternatives to intensive animal agriculture. If successful, such work could help shift large markets away from some of the most harmful practices for animals and the environment.
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