OVERVIEW: The Mastercard Foundation is a major grantmaker that focuses its global development funding on financial inclusion (particularly for women), education, vocational training, youth employment & livelihoods, health infrastructure and vaccines. Grantmaking prioritizes Africa and Indigenous communities in Canada.
IP TAKE: With $30 billion in assets, The Mastercard Foundation is one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Its strategy has shifted in recent years to prioritize a handful of large programs with focused goals, including huge investments in COVID-19 vaccines and youth employment in Africa. While the foundation offers a great deal of information about its goals and priorities, it is somewhat less transparent about its grantmaking and the organizations it supports. Mastercard does not accept proposals for funding but encourages “interested organizations to follow our social media channels and visit our website for future opportunities to collaborate.” Notably, applications to the Scholars Program are accepted, but these are administered by participating schools and universities, not by the foundation.
PROFILE: Gifted with shares from the financial services company Mastercard, the Toronto-based Mastercard Foundation was established in 2006 and functions separately from its corporate sister. The foundation’s mission is to “advance education and financial inclusion to catalyze prosperity in developing countries and to support Indigenous youth in Canada.” This funder names different strategies and initiatives, although many of these overlap, making it difficult to ascertain which grants stem from which strategies and/or initiatives. Its focus areas are Education and Transitions, Digital, Agriculture, Health, Refugees and Displaced Persons, and Disability Inclusion.
Grants for Global Development
Mastercard supports global development through all of its focus areas, and its work is centered on education and employment in Canada and across the African continent.
- The Young Africa Works Program prioritizes career education, vocational training and entrepreneurship in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Uganda.
- The foundation separately names several programs and initiatives, most of which support education, development, health and economic development in Africa.
- One program, EleV, works exclusively in Canada to “to enable 100,000 Indigenous young people to access post-secondary education and transition to meaningful livelihoods by 2030.”
Grants for Higher Education
The Mastercard Foundation’s Education and Transitions focus area supports efforts to provide “young people across Africa [with] access to quality and relevant education and skills to transition into dignified and fulfilling work.” This work is organized into several initiatives:
- The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program was launched in 2012 with the goal to “create the conditions that will enable young people to attain inclusive and relevant education, transition smoothly into dignified and fulfilling work, and lead transformative lives.” The program does not limit its scholarships to African institutions; several universities in the other parts of the world offer Mastercard scholarships to students from Africa.
- The Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning is an initiative that works to “support entrepreneurs and scale up technology innovations to improve teaching and learning in secondary education.” An early press release related to the program announced the program’s first cohort of edtech companies received grants of $40,000 and “customized mentorship, financial support, the opportunity to test, validate and scale their business.” Grantees include Ghana’s AkooBooks Audio, Kenya’s Eneza Education and Ethiopia’s iCog Labs.
- The Leaders in Teaching program supports teachers in Africa at every stage of their career and seeks to “improve the quality of secondary education.” The program has a two-pronged funding strategy that supports both country-level programs and the Mastercard Foundation Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning.
- The foundation’s EleV initiative works exclusively in Canada “to enable 100,000 Indigenous young people to access post-secondary education and transition to meaningful livelihoods by 2030.” The program targets Indigenous-led initiatives for systems transformation, including programs that “embed Indigenous languages, cultures and worldviews” in their functioning. The program names green energy, sustainable resources, eco-tourism, health, technology and construction as sectors that present “major opportunities for Indigenous youth.”
Grants for Economic Development
The foundation’s Digital focus area works to provide the workforce across Africa with the digital skills necessary to engage with the future of work. It supports programs focused on digital skills development, digital entrepreneurship, higher education e-learning and STEM, education technology (EdTech), and digital economy research.
Mastercard’s other economic development programs and initiatives largely work to expand access to financial services for entrepreneurs and employment opportunities for young people in sub-Saharan Africa.
- The Expanding Access to Financial Services program works to expand access to financial services for poor people, “drive business expansion and increase youth employment.” A list of the program’s partners and grantees, as well as grant amounts, is available on the program page.
- Hanga Ahazaza is a five-year, $50 million initiative that works to increase job opportunities for young people in Rwanda “while expanding the tourism and hospitality sector,” which Mastercard sees as “vital to reducing poverty, improving youth employability, and moving the nation to middle-income status.” The initiative also provides increased access to financial services and business development skills training for entrepreneurs and small businesses working in tourism and hospitality to expand employment opportunities for young people.
- Mastercard’s Agriculture grantmaking seeks to provide young people in Africa with the skills and resources to transform agricultural work into a “viable and profitable” form of employment, while “creating resilient, sustainable, and equitable agrifood systems.”
Grants for Global Health
The foundation’s Health focus area includes the Community Health Workforce Development and the Youth in Digital Health Jobs initiative, both of which seek to increase the number of health workers. It also has two programs established during the coronavirus pandemic to support local health care workers and to aid with long-term economic recovery.
- Created in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Saving Lives and Livelihoods program represents a $1.5 billion collaboration with the Africa CDC “to save the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in Africa, hastening the continent’s economic recovery.” This program will fund the Africa CDC until 2030, supporting initiatives for vaccination manufacture and administration, training for health care professionals, and health care research and infrastructure for the continent.
- The COVID-19 Recover and Resilience Program has operated in target areas in Africa and “within Indigenous communities in Canada” to “respond to the short-term impacts of this pandemic, while strengthening their resilience in the long-run.” Priorities include the needs of health care workers, first responders and students. It is unclear how long the foundation will continue to support its COVID-19 recovery and resilience efforts.
Grants for Immigrants and Refugees
The foundation supports refugees through two separate focus areas.
- The Refugees and Displaced Persons area is centered on three interconnected strategies: secondary education, transitions to work, and policy implementation.
- The Disability Inclusion area works to remove “systemic barriers to accessing education and employment” for young people with different and unique lived experiences, including “youth with disabilities, refugees, and displaced youth” in order to create a more inclusive world.
Important Grant Details:
The Mastercard Foundation’s grants range from about $15,000 to tens of millions. According to recent tax filings, around half of the foundation’s grants fell in the $15,000 to $950,000 range while the other half of the grants awarded ranged from $1.1 million to over $28 million.
- Grantmaking mainly goes to development initiatives in Africa and Indigenous communities in Canada, but many grantees are NGOs and/or re-granters based in Canada or the U.S.
- Most programs do not accept unsolicited funding proposals, but scholarship seekers may use the list of participating institutions to find Mastercard-funded grants through the Scholars Program.
- For additional information on past grantmaking, see the foundation’s News Releases.
- Use the from on the contact page to submit questions to the Mastercard Foundation. Find information about individual office locations here.
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