Aaron Maniam
Deputy Secretary (Industry & International)
Ministry of Communications & Information
Chief, Global Positioning Strategy
Aaron Maniam was awarded the Singapore Public Service Commission’s Overseas Merit Scholarship in 1998, graduating in 2001 with double First Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Somerville College, Oxford, where he was a Coombs Scholar and held the Mary Somerville prize for academic excellence. He was President of the Oxford Economics Society in 2000. In 2002, he received a Master of Arts degree in International and Development Economics from Yale University. He received a Master of Public Policy (with Distinction) from Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) in 2014, which he attended on a Lee Kuan Yew Postgraduate Scholarship from the Singapore government.
Aaron’s current work at MCI involves overseeing policy on the digital economy, building societal digital literacy and digital diplomacy. As Chief of the government-wide Global Positioning Strategy Office, he coordinates inter-agency efforts on public diplomacy, soft power projection and global branding.
He joined the Singapore government in 2004, serving on the North America Desk of the Foreign Service (2004-2006) and at Singapore’s Embassy in Washington DC (2006-2008), where he was the principal coordinator for Congressional liaison and issues relating to the Middle East. At the Strategic Policy Office (SPO) in the Public Service Division, he worked on scenario planning and analysis of long-term trends relevant to Singapore. He was appointed the first Head of the Singapore Government’s newly-formed Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF) in January 2010, while retaining his SPO portfolio. In July 2011, Aaron was appointed Director of the Institute of Policy Development (later renamed the Institute of Public Sector Leadership) at the Civil Service College (CSC), which organizes leadership training programmes for public sector talent (the top 1% of the public sector workforce). In 2012, he started the CSC Applied Simulation Training (CAST) Laboratory, an experiment to apply principles of “serious play” to training public officers to deal with complex environments. As Senior Director (Industry) at Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (2014-2017), he was responsible for coordinating economic policies and regulating the manufacturing, services and tourism sectors, as well overseeing long-term economic transformation.
Outside work, Aaron volunteers in causes relating to youth development, education and interfaith dialogue. He has hosted three television documentaries to date: The Big Questions: The Future of Work (2018); Work Is A Four Letter Word (2019); and Chasing Scarcity (2020), all aired on Channel News Asia.
March 2022