Recently, at the Festival of Innovation organised by GovInsider here, the question was posed: What difference would it make if women had a greater part in designing and running the digital systems that govern our lives?
The answer: That infrastructure would be centred around the principles of empathy, agency and resilience, and recognise that relationships are our most valuable currency. It would help us take better care of our families and community.
Singapore faces the twin problems of its worsening ultra-low fertility rate and being a super-aged society.
In 2025, Singapore’s total fertility rate sank to a new low of 0.87 which is the average number of children each woman would have in her reproductive years. There were only 27,500 resident births, the lowest number in Singapore’s recorded history.
At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong noted during the recent Parliament Committee of Supply debates that the number of working-age residents, aged 20-64 years old for every one person aged 65 and above, slid from 4.3 in 2020 to 3.3.
Since it is often expected that women bear the primary burden of caregiving, they have the greatest interest in mobilising digital technologies to help people exchange time and support with one another, addressing the challenges of parenthood, eldercare, social isolation as well as gender, class and digital divides.
The Poverty of Time: Tackling the Problem Head-on.
Women and caregivers in Singapore are often running on empty or are worried about ending up that way. Greater community support through the introduction of a national timebanking system that tracks and allows for the exchange of care and other forms of community self-help¹, could go some way to the problem.
When young and middle-aged Singaporean women are stretched between childcare, eldercare and holding down a job, the ‘heart of the home’ is strained, beats fast and erratically.
From Transactions to Relationships
As a pioneer in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, the first author has tracked how technology can scale businesses. By allowing digital systems to provide detailed records of how customers engage with the enterprises and their products, suggestions for how to connect better and satisfy their needs more effectively, emerge.
The same idea — shifting from simple transactions to relationship-building — could be applied to families and communities.Singapore already has world-class digital infrastructure that enables secure and seamless transactions. Singpass and PayNow have transformed how citizens verify their identities and transfer money.
The next step could be to build a platform that can now be mobilised to facilitate the exchange of time and care in a system of timebanking, using the same CRM approach.
This could become a form of digital public infrastructure that enhances relationships so critical for life and living well. Instead of each household feeling it is an island unto itself, technology could match people in different seasons of life, with different daily routines, experience and wisdom, energy and skills to support to each other. And, at scale.
Let’s call it ‘TimeSG’. It could function as a national digital timebank, where contributions to caregiving, mentoring and community services are recorded as “time credits”, measured in hours. In this system, people trade time rather than money.
Building on Singapore’s digital foundations
Singapore is particularly well positioned to implement such a system.It would be a master class in ‘Smart Nation’ engineering that builds on the three rails of digital public infrastructure and a physical one we have in Singapore.
First, Singpass provides ‘proof of humanity’ ensuring that every hour that is traded is tied to a verified individual and prevents bot manipulation and fraud.
Second, the LifeSG app already connects citizens to many government services and can serve as the platform to host the exchange and tap AI systems to ensure that the good deeds and time spent are bona fide for trading.
Third, the widely-used PayNow payment system demonstrates how interoperable systems can support large-scale digital transactions.
When designed from the outset to ride on the system of financial exchange that links Singapore’s PayNow to everyone, TimeSG — based on a “1 hour = 1 hour time credit” on blockchain — would be permanent and universal for people to trade acts of care and goodwill they took the time to offer, seamlessly. ‘Time’ would become a national asset.
A fourth advantage is the high-density public housing estates 80 per cent of the resident population of Singapore lives in. These satellite towns comprise social infrastructure like the markets and malls, community clubs, polyclinics, acute care facilities and active ageing centres, and sports, arts and educational institutions. These are the arenas where social support and caregiving take place at close quarters.
Piloting a digital kampong
Imagine starting this digitally enabled system of self-help, self-management and civic engagement in Tampines, a mature, multi-generational estate, and Punggol, home to a young, digitally savvy population.
They would provide the scale and diversity needed to pilot TimeSG effectively; where the nascent national system allows those with needs to find those with the time, capacity and skills to extend care by trading time credits.
Along with measuring the “velocity of money” that our market economy does, we can then measure the “velocity of time”, the speed at which favours are exchanged. It could become a leading indicator of well-being, resilience or a flourishing life in Singapore.
The Government and other organisations of goodwill could match these hours of care with gifts sent to citizens’ LifeSG accounts. Imagine again that five verified hours could be matched to 1 hour’s access to a public or private facility or service. Like the heart that grows stronger with exercise, this social capital gets nourished the more it is used.
Mentoring, tutoring, volunteering, sharing and caring emanate from the collaborative practices of women — from the time when mum got the aunty two doors down to help mind the kids while she ran an errand or performed her part-time job.
TimeSG would give visibility to this informal and care economy. Unveiling the hidden wiring to how community and family function would recognise the value women create as they straddle the worlds of family, economy and society.
Singaporean men who have a growing appreciation of this must be as much a part of TimeSG as they become increasingly involved in these acts of care.
Having children would be less of an isolating, daunting prospect if members of the broader community could offer help as they did “in the good old days”; the system “crowds in” the kampong into the endeavour. Pooling time and resources to address the care needs of seniors in our neighbourhoods would not go unnoticed either.
Singapore is already distinguished by its economic achievements and digital engineering nous. By building a digital kampong, TimeSG could draw on these strengths to value our social relationships, time and caregiving in quantifiable, secure assets that could be traded seamlessly in a special kind of bank.
Through it, we could draw a far larger circle of trust and grow our “family wealth” beyond the bounds of kinship to the wider community, increasing humanity’s resilience in the process.
[1] Refer to pages 7, 113-116
Fung Mei Lin is Vice-Chair of UN AI For Good Impact Steering Committee and Gillian Koh is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore.