UNDP China initiated a project called “Philanthropy for Sustainable Development in China” in collaboration with the China Foundation Center (CFC) in early 2017. Drawing on the CFC’s core data and existing platform, this collaborative project aims at comprehensively capturing and understanding the existing contribution of China’s philanthropic sector to the sustainable development goals. The project analyzed 5,545 Chinese foundations’ 83,038 charitable projects that tackle issues related to the SDGs. The project comprehensively depicts the distribution of China’s philanthropic actors under the SDGs, their contribution to the 17 SDGs, as well as highlights the philanthropic sector’s great potential to further achieve the SDGs in China. The key findings of the “Philanthropy for Sustainable Development in China” are based on a powerful database, in-depth data analysis, and present the results through various data visualization tools and a real-time publicly accessible platform.

Through assessing the current SDG landscape of philanthropic actors in China, establishing the SDG philanthropy platform, and promoting the SDGs, the UNDP and CFC partnership represents a first step in mobilizing an increasing number of Chinese philanthropic actors to realize the SDGs. The project and the tools it provides aim at supporting the development of China's philanthropic sector in support of sustainable development.