Singapore Charities Use Tech and $60K Grants to Better Help Families

In Singapore, six charities received $60,000 grants each in 2025 to use data and technology to better serve the people who need their help. The grants came from Bloomberg, a global financial data company, through a program called the Data for Good Exchange, or D4GX. The charities used the money to build new tools that track student behaviour, spot caregiver burnout, and connect families who live near each other. The goal was to turn scattered, hard-to-use information into clear pictures that staff could act on quickly.

One of the six charities was Rainbow Centre, a school that supports about 900 students with autism. For years, teachers and therapists stored information in separate reports and used different words to describe the same behaviours. That made it very hard to spot when a student was struggling or when a treatment was working. There was no easy way to see the full picture.

Now, staff enter details about student behaviour — like how often a meltdown happens, how long it lasts, and how intense it is — into a shared database. The system turns all that information into a simple trend line on a screen. A spike in the line tells staff that a student may need extra help, while a dip shows that an approach is working. Belinda Chua, an assistant director at Rainbow Centre, said the tool lets teachers spend less time on paperwork and more time on helping students.

Another charity, CaringSG, supports about 5,000 caregivers of children with special needs and people with disabilities. Before the program, its staff kept client information in different systems that did not talk to each other. This made it hard to get a clear view of any one family's situation. IT manager Chris Lim said important details, like whether a sibling was also acting as a caregiver, were easy to miss.

CaringSG built a new platform that pulls together each caregiver's information and links it to their family members. The platform can flag caregivers who are at higher risk of burning out — meaning they are exhausted and overwhelmed by the demands of caregiving. It can also show which caregivers live near each other so staff can pair them up for peer support. Chief executive Edwin Tan said he hopes the tool will help staff reach caregivers early, before a crisis occurs.

Dover Park Hospice, which cares for people who are near the end of their lives, also joined the D4GX program. Its social workers write detailed case notes about patients' caregivers, but reading through hundreds of those notes by hand took a very long time. The hospice used artificial intelligence, or AI, to read more than 500 case notes and score each caregiver's risk of burnout. The AI used a well-known clinical tool called the Zarit Burden Interview to produce those scores.

The AI analysis revealed useful patterns. For example, caregivers who were unemployed and cared for a loved one alone were more likely to burn out. Martha Ng, who leads the hospice's social work department, said that supporting caregivers matters deeply because they watch their loved ones suffer every day and need help with their own grief. Finding these patterns earlier means staff can reach out sooner, before the stress becomes too great.

All 57 Singapore-registered charities were invited to apply for D4GX at the start of 2025. Two workshops in June gave applicants basic training in how to work with data. The top six were then chosen for a deeper program from September to December, where they were paired with expert mentors from Bloomberg, GIC, Standard Chartered, and UBS. The $60,000 grants helped each charity pay for software, hire outside experts, or test different AI tools.

The program fits into a bigger push for technology in Singapore's social sector. In July 2025, Singapore's Ministry of Social and Family Development said it would spend $15 million to experiment with new technology for social services. Bloomberg plans to open the next round of D4GX applications in November and will expand the program to include more AI training. The charities involved say these tools are already changing the way they care for the people who need them most.