Alibaba Group will kick off its fifth annual Philanthropy Week on Sunday – an event that rallies efforts across its ecosystem to champion charitable causes.
This year’s event, running from Sept. 5 to Sept. 12, will bring together the top 10 influencers on Taobao Live, Alibaba’s livestreaming platform. The influencers – including Austin Li and Viya Huang – will host a three-hour real-time broadcast to promote agricultural products from rural areas to their millions of fans and raise awareness for philanthropic initiatives.
The livestream event will also feature appearances by celebrities, athletes and governors at county and district levels, encouraging sales of local delicacies.
Among the projects spotlighted in this year’s Philanthropy Week is an initiative by the China Women’s Development Foundation that has helped transform the lives of 5,000 women from rural villages, training them to become local artisans and creating supplementary income for their families.
Another charity, The China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, recruits volunteers within communities to take care of “left-behind children.” Each year, millions of Chinese children remain in their home villages, usually with relatives, while both parents work elsewhere. The project has looked after more than 525,000 children since its launch in 2015.
Throughout the week-long event, consumers can also explore a range of charitable projects on dedicated landing pages, as well as shop for products listed in marketplace Taobao’s Goods for Good program. The program allows sellers on the e-commerce platform to donate a percentage of sales to a charity of their choice, such as organizations that donate school supplies to students in need in Nepal and Ethiopia or fund youth education in Kenya and Sri Lanka. Taobao automatically transfers the money after each purchase.
Last year, about 480 million consumers and 2.5 million merchants made more than 10 billion donations through the Goods for Good program, supporting over 3,000 philanthropic organizations globally.
Alibaba launched its first Philanthropy Week in 2017 and committed to working with NGOs and charities to incubate 100 key projects over the course of five years.