Asian charities and NGOs: the Asia charity database

How are NGOs and charities regulated in Asia?

NGOs and charities in Asia register under a wide range of national systems rather than one regional framework, and how open each register is decides how deep our data goes: the record counts on this page reflect data openness, not the actual size of each country's civil society.

How many NGOs are there in Asia?

Nobody can give you one number for the continent, and anyone who does is guessing. Asia has no regional register, and most countries do not treat "NGO" as a legal category at all: they register associations, foundations, trusts, and public-benefit corporations, each under its own law. What can be counted is what the sources publish, which is what this page holds: 207,562 organizations across 13 countries, 8 of them from a national register or regulator. That number moves when a register is refreshed or a new country opens its data, not when the sector itself grows.

Which Asian countries have a public charity or NGO register?

Where open registers exist, the legal forms are recognizable. Japan registers incorporated NPOs and public-interest corporations through a national portal run under its NPO law. South Korea publishes nonprofit registrations through the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's open data platform. Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue consolidates approved nonprofits from federal, provincial, and securities-commission lists into one central registry. Nepal's Social Welfare Council, Bangladesh's NGO Affairs Bureau, and Sri Lanka's NGO Secretariat each maintain their own registers, and Thailand's Revenue Department publishes its approved charitable organizations. The Philippines works through accreditation instead: PCNC certification and DSWD licensing lists identify recognized social welfare organizations. Common forms across these systems include the incorporated NPO, the society, the trust, the foundation (yayasan in Indonesia), and the licensed association.

Why does GiveRadar hold only India's FCRA-registered NGOs?

India is the largest special case among charity organizations in Asia. Registration is fragmented across state and central systems, so our Indian records are the FCRA subset: the NGOs licensed for foreign funding, which is the deepest slice published in importable form. India's wider nonprofit sector is far larger, and most of it is not published in a form anyone can import.

What happens when an Asian country has no open register?

Elsewhere the picture is thinner. Malaysia and Cambodia publish no importable government register, so Malaysian organizations are listed on GiveRadar from Hati.my, a curated NGO directory, and Cambodian organizations from the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia's directory: both are vetted sources, neither is a government registry, and their records typically carry names, categories, and contact details rather than official registration data or financials. Indonesian records come from the SMERU Research Institute's database, and Vietnamese records from COMINGO's published list of international NGOs, a government list rather than a charity register. For those countries our profiles say "listed on GiveRadar", never "registered", because we will not claim registry sourcing we do not have.

What does an Asian charity record on GiveRadar contain?

What a record contains also follows its source. Registry-sourced records carry official names and registration identifiers, in local languages including Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Sinhala, and Bengali, with contact details, websites, and narratives added through enrichment where public sources exist, up to 80+ normalized fields per record where the source publishes them. Financial figures are limited across much of the region because few Asian registers publish them, and we display financials only where a source does. If you need a list of charities in Asia for research or grantmaking, the honest version is exactly this: strong registry data in nine countries, curated directory data in the rest, and per-country "last updated" dates so you can see how fresh each set is.

Can I access Asian charity data through an API?

Yes. Every Asian record on this page is available through the GiveRadar REST API and MCP server, with a free tier and paid tiers for volume. See the charity data API page for endpoints, fields, and pricing. To query one country, use /api/v1/search/?q={name}&country=JP and swap the country code for any of the 13 covered here (the q parameter is required; there is no collection-listing endpoint). The same records are reachable over MCP, so an agent can read registration details, financials where published, and integrity assessments without scraping the pages.