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.
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, young people with disabilities and refugee youth.
Thematic Sectors
The Fund has a focus on SMEs that are implementing their solutions in three key sectors; agriculture, climate adaptation and digital economy.
Each of these will have calls for proposals that SMEs can apply to for a chance to be selected as Fund participants.
- Agriculture
- Climate Adaptation
- Digital Economy
Benefits
The Fund for Resilience and Prosperity aims to address a broad spectrum of SME-specific challenges as well as macro issues using four interventions:
- Challenge Fund – 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.
- Connect Fund – Providing investor readiness support to the SMEs and negotiation of partnerships with potential financiers to ensure sustainability and growth.
- Technical Assistance – Adding value beyond financial support through technical assistance and capacity building to address the barriers concerning human capital and access to markets.
- Convening and Influencing – 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.
Funding
- The Fund will provide grants to selected SMEs through the Challenge Fund intervention. The funding size and structure will be decided on a case-by-case basis after evaluating the applicant organisations and performing the necessary due diligence.
- The Fund aims to support SMEs across three target sectors to create dignified and fulfilling jobs for young people, including young women, refugee youth, and youth living with disabilities in the target countries. Young people, especially young women in Africa, will be the centre of focus of the Fund.
- An enterprise with moderate growth potential or high growth potential with the ability to absorb and utilize properly financial support of between US$ 500,000 to US$ 2,500,000, which will be disbursed over a 3-year period, based on applicants’ development stage, scalability, and business model.
- Must be from 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 and application.
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