James Chen

James Chen is a visionary philanthropist and campaigner with a ‘moonshot mindset,’ a model of audacious leadership which calls upon high-net-worth individuals to invest capital, time and expertise into high-risk, early-stage innovations to achieve global impact.

James uses this moonshot mindset to focus on two key areas: early childhood literacy and the world’s largest unmet disability, poor vision.

James has spent over two decades working on this deceptively simple problem — how to bridge vision care gaps and deliver universal access to vision correction. This mission began with Vision for a Nation, a pioneering program that transformed Rwanda into the first developing nation to provide universal eye care to its entire population. James then founded Clearly, an internationally acclaimed campaign that helped to reframe vision correction from a siloed health issue to a high-priority driver of global development and economic productivity. His advocacy was pivotal in encouraging the United Nations to universally adopt its first-ever resolution on vision in 2021, which committed all 193 member states to “Vision for Everyone” by 2030.

Beyond his work in vision, James is a deep-rooted champion of early childhood literacy. Through The Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation, he and his wife, Su Lee, have pioneered initiatives to foster a lifelong love of reading. They founded Bring Me a Book (Hong Kong), an NGO promoting family literacy, and established the Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award to recognize and encourage excellence in children’s literature.

James’ approach to philanthropy embodies his mantra of “privatizing failure and socializing success,” arguing that philanthropists possess a unique “superpower” — the freedom to absorb the costs of high-risk pilots so that society can benefit from the resulting breakthroughs. By funding the “unproven” stages of innovation, he provides the investable thesis and data needed to unlock institutional-scale action from governments and international bodies.

James is responsible for funding DRIVE — a set of nine randomized controlled research trials designed to inform policy that will accelerate affordable eye care, sustainable development and equity globally. Focusing on multiple demographics across geographies and industries, the trials provide a body of research and evidence to make vision correction a global priority. DRIVE aims to help demonstrate that low-cost interventions — glasses — can improve education, literacy, productivity, mental health and financial independence in developing countries.

As an author and expert commentator on philanthropic trends, James’s book, Clearly: How a 700 Year Old Invention Can Change the World Forever, explains his mission and identifies the barriers to delivering universal access to glasses. In 2025, a second edition was published titled Clearly: A Short History of Eyeglasses and How a Moonshot Idea can Change Everything, which supports his focus on empowering a new generation of philanthropists to meet the “fierce urgency of now”. He seeks to inspire capital holders to harness the imminent USD124 trillion wealth transfer and the transformative power of AI to solve global challenges at a speed previously thought impossible.

James was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath and was the recipient of the 2024 Spears Impact Award for his contributions to global philanthropy.