Jack Ma Foundation

Sector

Philanthropy and education

Chinese name

马云公益基金会

Programme

Day 4 · 14 Oct 2026 · Hangzhou

The Jack Ma Foundation (马云公益基金会) is the personal foundation of Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Set up in 2014 and funded from his own wealth, it invests mainly in people in rural China: teachers, head teachers and children in boarding schools. Outside China it supports African entrepreneurs with an annual prize of 1.5 million dollars. A meeting with the foundation was on the programme for day 4 of the China Business Mission 2026, in Ma's home city of Hangzhou.

Who funds the foundation and where does the money go?

Two foundations are often confused. The Alibaba Foundation is the group's corporate foundation and has received 0.3 per cent of annual revenue since 2010. The Jack Ma Foundation is Ma's private foundation. When it was criticised at home in spring 2020 for sending COVID-19 aid abroad, it stated that all of that money came from Ma's personal donations and that it raised nothing from the public, as China Development Brief reported.

The foundation lists four areas of work: education, entrepreneurship, women's leadership and the environment. In practice most of the money and attention goes to rural education. The word 公益 in its Chinese name says a lot about its approach. At a philanthropy conference in Hangzhou in 2016, Ma distinguished between 慈善, charity, and 公益, working for the common good: charity is about giving, 公益 is about taking part.

Why a former English teacher chose education

Jack Ma (马云) was born in Hangzhou in 1964. As a teenager he practised his English by showing tourists around West Lake. After teacher training college in his home city he taught English, until he founded Alibaba in 1999 with seventeen co-founders. On 10 September 2019, Teachers' Day in China, he handed over the chairmanship of Alibaba to focus on education and philanthropy. He still likes to introduce himself as a teacher first, and that is the thread running through the foundation. How the company that built his fortune grew is covered in our article on Alibaba Group.

Rural teachers as the flagship

The Rural Teacher Programme (乡村教师计划) started in September 2015 as the foundation's first national project. Each year it selects a hundred teachers who have spent years teaching in village schools. At launch the foundation required at least five years of rural experience. Each laureate receives 100,000 yuan, spread over three years, plus a programme of training, exchanges and coaching, Hangzhou Daily reported at the launch. In return, the teacher stays in the countryside for those three years.

By early 2026 the count stood at 1,101 teachers supported, from more than 2,000 villages. According to the foundation, 99 per cent of them are still teaching. The twelfth round opened on 31 March 2026, again for a hundred places, the Yangtse Evening Post reported.

The laureates are celebrated every year around the Laba festival in January: in the early years with a gala on the island of Hainan, more recently online. The ritual is deliberate. Turning the village teacher into a hero makes the profession more attractive. The same idea lies behind the programmes for head teachers, boarding schools and students who want to teach in the countryside. A good head teacher keeps good teachers. And children who board during the week because their parents work in the city need more than a new building: decent meals, care and a warm school life.

Africa's Business Heroes, a prize run like a TV show

After a trip through Africa in 2017, Ma decided to support African entrepreneurs as well. The result was Africa's Business Heroes, with a first final in Accra in 2019. The final is a televised pitch competition with ten finalists and has recently been held in Kigali. In December 2025 the Tanzanian Diana Orembe won with NovFeed, which turns agricultural waste into fish feed and fertiliser. According to AllAfrica, Ma attended in person and there were 32,000 applicants that year.

The 2026 edition drew more than 24,000 applications from all 54 African countries. The ten finalists come from eight countries, from Egypt and Ethiopia to Benin and South Africa, and four of them are women. The final takes place in Kigali on 1 and 2 December 2026, How We Made It In Africa reported.

What does the foundation have to do with Europe and Belgium?

As far as is known, the foundation has no office or programme of its own in Europe. The most tangible link with Belgium dates from March 2020. Together with the Alibaba Foundation, the Jack Ma Foundation sent masks, tests and protective clothing to some fifteen European countries. Belgium received 300,000 medical masks, which went to Sciensano, the national public health institute. The cargo planes landed at Liège Airport, the European hub of the Alibaba-led eWTP trade platform, of which Belgium was the first European partner (Alizila).

In October 2020 the foundation became one of the founding partners of the Earthshot Prize, Prince William's environmental award, with an initial gift of 3 million pounds. Ma himself joined the council that selects the winners (Alizila). For the foundation, Europe is mainly a partner and a stage. That is also where the opening lies for European organisations in education, AI or sustainability.

Education in the age of AI

Since 2025 the selected teachers have received training in using AI. At the Laba gathering in January 2026, where Ma addressed the teachers online, the question came up whether the countryside will fall behind in the AI era. According to The Paper, he replied that the question is no longer whether schools use AI, but how they teach children to use it well. He sees the real divide not in technology but in curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgement and collaboration. Education, he argued, should not compete with AI at calculating and memorising. Pupils should learn to ask "ten thousand different good questions".

For a foundation that works in village classrooms, this is a practical choice. One laureate from Guangdong has had his pupils build more than 500 mini-programs, including a calendar that combines the 24 traditional solar terms with AI. Ma calls AI a challenge for the countryside, but also a chance to return to the core of education.

What an entrepreneur can learn here

The foundation works the way an entrepreneur works. It invests in people rather than buildings, looks for leverage such as the head teacher, selects rigorously and uses recognition as a driver. That explains why a relatively small programme gets so much attention in China.

There are limits too. Vision, money and visibility depend on one person. The last detailed public figures date from January 2020: over five years 1.09 billion yuan received and 477 million spent, of which 147 million on education (36Kr). And 1,101 teachers is a small number next to the millions teaching in rural China. The model's strength lies in the example it sets: supporting a small group well and visibly changes how a country looks at a profession. For anyone who wants to work with Chinese partners, it also shows how naturally Chinese entrepreneurs combine business thinking with a social role.