Mastercard Foundation Fund for Resilience and Prosperity Agribusiness Challenge Fund for SMEs across Africa 2024

OPPORTUNITY DETAILS

Association

for9a Mina7

Deadline

22 Nov 2024

Opportunity funding

Partial funding

Eligible Countries

This opportunity is destined for all countries

Eligible Region

All Regions

Award or Grant Description $$ varies

The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Resilience and Prosperity is the second phase of a program from the Mastercard Foundation. The first phase was the Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity, an eight-year program established in 2014. That Fund supported 38 participants from 15 countries in Africa innovating and scaling financial products and services targeting the rural population with a large focus on agriculture. One major highlight is the Fund enabled over 5.3 million people to have 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 adaptation, 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.

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Eligibility Criteria

Each challenge fund sector is different. However, all challenges will seek proposals from SMEs that are innovative, commercially viable, and that will create dignified and fulfilling work opportunities for young women and men, young people with disabilities or refugee youth. In each challenge, applicants will be required to meet certain criteria.
Selection will be based on applications meeting a certain threshold of the Fund selection criteria. Read more about this on the specific challenge page.

Offered Benefits

Interventions

The Mastercard Foundation 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 (TA)

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.