Singapore turns matchmaker amid rock-bottom birthrate

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.

“I feel slightly pessimistic about the future as a whole,” Nur, who asked to use a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.

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. “It makes quite a funny story if something did come out of this.”

Born out of GovTech’s annual hackathon, where staff develop and test new ideas, FirstDate is being piloted among single government employees aged 21 to 35.

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.