The middle-income moment: Navigating evidence-based development in Southeast Asia

When I reflect on 2025, one reality stands out: Southeast Asia is facing a defining moment. Social inequities in sectors like health and education continue to persist and widen, even as countries in the region are racing towards higher economic status. This, along with global disruptions in the development landscape (with nearly $70B in aid evaporating globally), has made the gap between policy ambition and implementation capacity ever starker. Economic growth alone won’t close this gap, and reduced foreign aid means we must do more with less, and do it better.

This is the middle-income bind: the core challenge is no longer solely the lack of resources, but the ability to leverage resources effectively to make the most social impact, ensure quality delivery at scale, and leave no one behind.

Governments are building capability to deliver services, but consistency and quality across entire populations remain challenging. Public resources are substantial in absolute terms, but are still stretched thin when measured against the scale of need. At the same time, philanthropies and NGOs across Southeast Asia are rising to the moment by filling funding gaps and stepping in to help strengthen government capacity. 

What unites all these endeavors is our conviction that real progress requires decisions driven by evidence. Supporting impact-driven leaders, whether they be from governments, philanthropies, or NGOs, to generate and use that evidence is where trusted decision-making partners like IDinsight come in. 

In 2025, IDinsight expanded its portfolio in Southeast Asia to provide critical support to these decision-makers. We doubled down on advocating for evidence-based decision-making across all our partners, offering support to get the right data towards the best decisions to create the most impact. We have intentionally worked on expanding our services to reach changemakers in Southeast Asian philanthropies and NGOs who are key to solving some of our most pressing development issues in the region. Our approach goes beyond generating evidence by actively working within government and philanthropic institutions to establish evidence-based decision-making as the norm for how development choices get made. 

We continued to leverage our strengths by helping shape government strategy through large-scale evidence building and system evaluation, particularly in the Philippines. 

In our sixth year of collaborating with the Department of Health, we conducted two qualitative deep dives into vaping and HIV to help guide the department’s future health promotion reforms. In education, we completed an early-stage assessment of the national implementation of the Inclusive Education Act – a key priority of the Department of Education and our learning partner, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2). In a span of 7 months, we conducted process evaluations of three national dietary supplementation programs with the Philippine Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPDev) and the World Food Programme. These evaluations feed directly into Social Development Committee meetings, informing how billions of pesos are allocated in national budgeting and development planning for programs tackling undernutrition among Filipino children. We have also been ramping up our client development efforts in Cambodia, building on our previous work with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport to further broaden our Southeast Asia footprint.

While we have built and maintained strong partnerships with government agencies, 2025 also marked a deliberate investment in working with non-governmental actors, who are taking a more active role in shaping development in the region.

With the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation in the Philippines, we’re examining how teacher competency building affects student learning outcomes. In Indonesia, with support from the AgResults Steering Committee, we’re evaluating technology adoption’s impact on smallholder aquaculture farmers, addressing food systems resilience. Beyond active projects, we’ve invested significantly in strengthening our network and relationships with philanthropies—participating in AVPN’s Southeast Asia and Global Summits in Singapore and Hong Kong, and speaking as a panelist at the Business and Philanthropy Forum on AI’s potential for philanthropies and their social impact. We’re also continuing active discussions with the Asia Philanthropy Circle on early childhood development, as well as with impact-focused organizations such as Edu Farmers and YCAB Foundation in Indonesia. These engagements reflect not only our commitment to cross-sector collaboration but also our readiness to partner with philanthropies seeking to maximize the reach, rigor, and sustainability of their investments in the region.

Across all this work, one principle drives us: evidence transforms decisions, and better decisions create greater impact.

We are committed to supporting leaders and changemakers with the greatest potential to create positive, lasting impact, to help them generate and use evidence for stronger decision-making. 

Looking toward 2026, Southeast Asia is at the precipice of where development is heading: domestic actors leading, with data and evidence guiding decisions, and innovation enabling actors to do more with less. 

To our partners and funders, thank you. Your trust, collaboration, and thought partnership have fueled our progress and pushed us to evolve alongside the sector’s needs. 

For us, we’re excited and ready to take more on. We look forward to deepening these connections, working with philanthropies ready to co-invest in evaluations that shape practice, governments embedding evidence into budgets and policies, and regional networks eager to learn and scale what works. The challenges are complex, but the opportunity is clear: together, we can unlock the full potential of Southeast Asia’s development.

I also invite you to dive into our Year in Review 2025 for insights into IDinsight’s impact across the world.