Singapore – Nur Aisyah, a 30-year-old civil servant, has spent the past couple of years looking for a partner, with little to show for it. Nur rarely meets men through work or her hobbies and finds dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble “terrible”, with potential suitors either putting scant effort into their profile or struggling to hold a conversation over text. Nur is open to having children but also struggles to imagine raising them in a city where housing and childcare costs are high, and where the burden of childcare typically falls hardest on women.
So when Singapore’s technology agency GovTech recently rolled out FirstDate, a dating platform for public servants that uses a Nobel-winning algorithm, Nur signed up out of curiosity “It’s more of the mindset of ‘Why not?’” she said. Participants log in using their national digital ID and answer a survey about their interests, habits and values before being matched with one prospective partner at a time. Sign-ups for the pilot closed on Monday.
GovTech has told local media that no decision has been made on whether to expand the service beyond employees at government agencies. Singapore’s decision to get into the matchmaking game is its latest attempt to lift a birthrate that has sunk to historic lows. Fewer than 30,000 babies were born in the Southeast Asian city-state in 2025, bringing the fertility rate to a record low of 0.87.
In August, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a series of new measures to support families, including almost 70,000 Singapore dollars ($55,000) worth of financial benefits for every child from birth until age 17. For Singapore, whose six million citizens are practically the city-state’s only resource, the prospect of a shrinking, fast-ageing population is existential. In February, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong warned that without intervention, the citizen population could begin to shrink by the early 2040s, leaving fewer workers to care for the elderly.
Singapore already leans heavily on immigration to meet its workforce needs, with the government expecting to take in 25,000 to 30,000 new citizens annually over the next five years, a politically sensitive influx in a country whose 6.2 million inhabitants fill an area less than half the size of London. Yet even as Singapore’s bureaucrats urge people to have babies, many Singaporeans have enthusiastically embraced a child-free lifestyle, preferring to reap the benefits of living in a double-income household with fewer bills or to lavish their attention on pets. Singapore has never been shy about meddling in matters of the heart.
In a 1983 speech that sparked what became known as the “Great Marriage Debate”, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and longest-serving prime minister, warned that graduates, especially women, were marrying late and having fewer children than the less educated. The following year, Lee’s government introduced the controversial Graduate Mothers’ Scheme, which prioritised the children of university-educated mothers in school admissions. Around the same time, the government established the Social Development Unit (SDU) to organise events where graduate singles could mingle, prompting some Singaporeans to joke that the body’s initials should stand for “Single, Desperate and Ugly”.
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