Alibaba founder Jack Ma receives the Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award in Singapore on Oct 15, 2019. FORBES ASIA

Jack Ma expects China to have hundreds of thousands of business people with their own charitable foundations in the future, but the nation is really just getting started.

“A lot of countries have a long history of creating philanthropic foundations, but China is just beginning,” he said during a dialogue with Forbes Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes while attending the Forbes CEO Conference in Singapore.

The Alibaba founder was speaking at the event after receiving the Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award on Tuesday evening. The award recognizes a lifetime of achievement and is a celebration of global business success bestowed upon an individual who embodies and exemplifies the ideals of entrepreneurship championed by Forbes.

Ma said he’s been studying many other foundations in recent years with the aim of building a system for philanthropic giving in China through his foundation that was established in 2014.

He stepped down as chairman of the e-commerce giant in September, although he will remain a lifetime member at the Alibaba Partnership, a special company governance structure that nominates the majority of its board.

Ma says he first started preparing for life after Alibaba almost a decade ago, and has since closely followed established philanthropic institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The entrepreneur recalls how he discussed China’s nascent philanthropic scene with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett when they visited China at the time, and has since kept communicating on issues ranging from climate change to healthcare projects in Africa.

Ma, a former English teacher, has taken a strong interest in Africa. He says he will travel to Africa next month to give out the Alibaba Entrepreneur Award, and help empower young people in the region. He says for Africa to develop further, it needs three Es: E-government, to make the government more transparent, Entrepreneurs, to make them heroes, and Education, to make people know what they want and they don’t want.

Last year, Ma also launched an entrepreneur contest in the region. The Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative, which awards $1 million each year to entrepreneurs across all industries, is open for anyone in Africa’s 54 countries to apply. 

“The thing is that entrepreneurship in Africa is so different…Most entrepreneurs in other countries, they always want to [start an] enterprise, they want to go for IPO,” Ma said in Singapore. " These people in Africa, they want to change Africa. They want to change their lives.”