James Chen

Founder, Clearly

James Chen is a visionary philanthropist and campaigner who has dedicated the last two decades of his life to addressing the world’s largest unmet disability – uncorrected poor vision. His work is driven by a “moonshot mindset”, a model of audacious leadership that calls on capital holders to invest not just their wealth, but their time and expertise, into high-risk, systemic solutions.

At the core of James’s philanthropic journey is the belief that a 700-year-old invention – glasses – can change the world forever if made accessible to the 2.2 billion people currently living without them. 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 achieving the first-ever United Nations 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 strong advocate for early childhood literacy. Through his family foundation, The Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation, he and his wife, Su Lee, have pioneered initiatives to foster a lifelong love of reading for young children. They founded Bring Me a Book, an NGO promoting family literacy, and established the Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award to recognise and encourage excellence in children’s literature.

James’ philanthropic approach embodies his mantra of “privatising failure and socialising 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.

As an author and expert commentator, James’s book, Clearly, outlines his mission to dismantle the barriers to universal sight. Today, he is focused on empowering a new generation of philanthropists to meet the “fierce urgency of now”. He seeks to inspire capital holders to harness the imminent $124 trillion wealth transfer and the transformative power of AI to solve global challenges at a speed previously thought impossible. James holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath and was the recipient of the 2024 Spears Impact Award for his contributions to global philanthropy.