About the Fund
The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Resilience and Prosperity is the second phase of a program from the Mastercard Foundation. The first phase was the Fund for Rural Prosperity, an eight-year program established in 2014. That Fund supported 38 participants from 15 countries in Africa to innovate and scale up financial products and services targeting rural populations with a large focus on smallholder farmers. One major highlight is the Fund enabled over 5.3 million people to have better access to financial products and services, exceeding an initial target of 1 million.
As a result of this success and the learnings gathered, the Mastercard Foundation Fund for Resilience and Prosperity, a new, seven-year, US$ 126 million fund was established in 2023. This Fund aims to support Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) across the agriculture, climate impact and digital economy sectors in 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main objective of the Fund is to unlock enterprise growth and catalyze, scale up and sustain the creation of dignified and fulfilling work opportunities for young women and men.
Interventions
The Fund for Resilience and Prosperity aims to address a broad spectrum of SME-specific challenges as well as macro issues using four interventions:
Key Benefits
- Offering direct financial support through a challenge fund to address the resource flow barriers faced by SMEs looking to scale up and, in turn, create and sustain employment opportunities for young women and men.
- Providing investor-readiness support to the SMEs and negotiating partnerships with potential financiers to ensure sustainability and growth.
- Adding value beyond financial support through technical assistance and capacity building to address the barriers concerning human capital and access to markets.
- Convening relevant stakeholders to encourage an enabling business environment through experienced partners and digital platforms to drive systematic change and address the issues that impede the creation of work opportunities for the youth, especially young women.
Thematic Sectors
The Fund focuses on SMEs implementing their solutions in three key sectors; agriculture, climate impact and digital economy.
Each of these will have competitive challenges or calls for proposals that SMEs can apply to for a chance to be selected as Fund participants.
Countries of Focus
The Fund's objective is to support SMEs in 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This will ensure the distribution of SME-based solutions that can sustainably create dignified and fulfilling work for young men and women, young people with disabilities and refugee youth even after the end of the program.
The countries are Benin, Burundi, Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
For more information, visit: Agribusiness Challenge Fund
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