Managing Today’s Costs, Investing in Our Children’s Future – Leap Philanthropy welcomes new initiatives in Budget 2025 to support working families
Yesterday, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong delivered the 2025 Budget Statement, outlining a suite of support measures for working families, a key demographic group which Leap Philanthropy has been advocating for.
We welcome the new initiatives that will help working families manage education-related and household expenses amidst rising living costs. These include the S$500 LifeSG Credits for children aged 0-12 and the S$500 top-up to Edusave and Post-Secondary Education Accounts for those aged 13 to 20. We noted these schemes will benefit about 755,000 children and youths.
These schemes are in the impact direction of several of Leap201’s policy advocacy efforts for lower-income working families and their children. In our Workfare Reimagined report released in 2023, we had proposed regular payments to children below 21 years old from Workfare families, with similar disbursement mechanisms to parents and Edusave accounts.
Leap201’s 2025 Budget proposal
More recently, we proposed the Bus4Kids initiative, suggesting that young families with primary school-aged children receive subsidies for their school bus fares. We have regularly engaged with the government on these recommendations in recent years and are heartened that it is responding to calls to offer greater support to working families in these challenging times.
Care4Students (C4S) Programme
Our policy advocacy efforts complement the programmes we run on the ground to give practical academic and mentoring support to students from lower-income families. We are proud to share that our first batch of 49 C4S beneficiaries have graduated from primary school last year and shown significant improvements in their academic scores and self-confidence.
📌 Read more about the relevant measures in The Straits Times: https://lnkd.in/garKkkbn