Foundation History

The Foundation’s Secondary Education in Africa: Preparing Youth for the Future of Work is published, showcasing best practices and forward-looking recommendations for how secondary education can better prepare youth to succeed. The publication provides strategies and models on how secondary education can prepare youth for employment or entrepreneurship opportunities.

Secondary Education in Africa has become the ‘go-to’ resource for secondary education reform in Africa.

The Foundation creates the COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Program to respond to a global pandemic by delivering emergency support for health workers, first responders, and students. The program assists institutions, small businesses, and young learners within Africa and in Indigenous communities in Canada to respond and adapt to the short-term impacts of COVID-19. It also seeks to enable economic recovery by deepening the capacity and strengthening the resilience of communities and diverse institutions.

The Foundation’s rapid response enabled quick mobilization, targeting, and scale up to help economies cope, and even thrive, during the pandemic.

The Young Africa Works strategy is launched to enable 30 million African youth, 70% of whom are young women, to access dignified and fulfilling work by 2030.

After its first decade of programming and research, the Foundation leveraged its learnings in education and financial inclusion to inform the development of the strategy. Understanding that employment is a particularly important measure of poverty reduction, the Foundation focused the strategy on a single, significant challenge — youth unemployment — to achieve even greater impact across the continent.

The Foundation expands and establishes offices in seven African countries with the Young Africa Works strategy. The countries are chosen for their enabling environment for growth and commitment to addressing the youth employment challenge.

This transformative shift in operations demonstrated the Foundation’s commitment to being closer and more responsive to its work, partners, and program participants. Establishing a significant presence in Africa has enabled the Foundation to curate and execute programs that align with national, regional, and Pan-African priorities and are co-created with governments, private sector, young people, and other relevant stakeholders.

Digital Access: The Future of Financial Inclusion in Africa is published, highlighting the opportunities and challenges in furthering financial inclusion on the continent.

The report recognized financial inclusion as a catalyst for equitable development and inclusive economic growth.

The Foundation’s Leaders in Teaching initiative and its Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning in ICT are established.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Education and other national agencies, the Leaders in Teaching initiative addresses a significant need to improve secondary education and enhance the quality and appeal of the teaching profession in Rwanda and then Ghana in 2023. The Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning in ICT is established to be an incubator and accelerator of education technology innovations, helping to increase access to quality education while advancing the integration of technology in education policies and practices across Africa.

The Foundation co-creates the EleV Program, a tertiary education initiative for Indigenous young people in Canada, with the goal of doubling enrollment and completion rates of Indigenous youth at two tertiary education institutions — Vancouver Island University and Yukon University. This represents the Foundation’s response to one of the Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report regarding the need to fundamentally transform education and employment systems. EleV is a collaborative effort with Indigenous-led organizations, higher education institutions, communities, and Indigenous leaders and youth.

The Foundation made an initial commitment of enabling 10,000 Indigenous young people to access post-secondary education and transition to meaningful work; as part of the program’s national launch in 2022, this commitment was expanded to 100,000.

The Foundation publishes its first commissioned research report: Invisible Lives: Understanding Youth Livelihoods in Ghana and Uganda, informed by the Youth Livelihoods Diaries research project. The report engages youth directly to understand the strategies they use to address the pressures and opportunities they face when engaged in a mix of informal employment, self-employment, and agriculture-related activities to sustain their livelihoods.

The report provided insight into how development programs that offer skills training for formal sector careers fall short of reaching the millions of youth engaged in mixed livelihoods and made the case for an innovative approach to youth employment training strategies in Africa.

The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity is launched to stimulate the innovation and scaling of products and services by financial service providers.

Initially intended to reach one million financially excluded rural people, the Fund has enabled over five million people to access innovative savings, credit, and insurance products and services; it also enabled entrepreneurs to create access to more than 4,000 jobs. Over a seven year period, the Fund led to financial inclusion and improved rural and agricultural livelihoods. While the Fund has closed, its success motivated the co-creation of the Fund for Resilience and Prosperity in 2022. This new Fund addresses the barriers that hinder opportunities for dignified and fulfilling work for young people and supports youth-led MSMEs to spur innovation among young entrepreneurs.

Fund for Rural Prosperity

Fund for Resilience and Prosperity

The inaugural Young Africa Works Summit highlights effective approaches to youth unemployment and opportunities in the agricultural sector. Over 50 young people are invited to share their perspectives and experiences as panelists and moderators.

This signature learning event convened multiple viewpoints, partnerships, and connections to better understand how the agricultural value chain can be a primary source of opportunity for young men and women across Africa. The Summit’s namesake and our learnings led us towards our future Young Africa Works strategy.

The Foundation publishes Change That Matters: Learning From Our Partnerships, the first learning report issued by the Foundation.

Change That Matters became the first in a series of learning reports. It offered a transparent view of successes and challenges in the Foundation’s work and underscored the organization’s commitment to learning and collaboration.

The first Mastercard Foundation Symposium on Financial Inclusion (SoFI) is developed in partnership with the Boulder Institute for Microfinance. Its goal is to promote client-centred solutions to achieve scale and impact.

The Foundation develops its Economic Opportunities for Youth strategy, which emphasizes the need for holistic programming to remove barriers to youth employment and to focus on skills that employers require in economic growth sectors. The strategy seeks to ensure young people have better opportunities to progress to more stable livelihoods.

Informed by the Foundation’s Youth Think Tank insights, the strategy centred on young people’s reality of mixed approaches to livelihoods and provided support to transition into the workforce.

The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program is launched to expand access to education and to develop a cohort of 15,000 ethical leaders supporting social transformation and economic growth across the continent. Through the Scholars Program, the Foundation makes a long-term commitment to support youth with limited financial means to pursue their aspirations and enrich their communities.

This was the first time the Foundation designed a program and facilitated a collaborative network of partners in education; this network has become a driver of systemic change at scale across the higher education sector in Africa.

The Foundation Youth Think Tank is established, giving voice to youth involved in our programs while ensuring youth-led insights consistently inform the Foundation’s decision-making.

Launched with eight members, the Think Tank has grown to over 100 researchers from across Africa who led the research and publication of a series of learning reports and influenced program design, impact strategy, and programming goals.

The Foundation launches the Learn, Earn and Save Initiative, notable for its testing of strategies to integrate education, skills training, entrepreneurship, and financial services for youth.

This novel learning partnership model was the first program to use a consortium approach. It successfully demonstrated how program implementers, funders, and learning partners can work together to enhance programming, further policy agendas, and move the youth livelihoods and evaluation sectors forward. The initiative led to the creation of the Foundation’s third programming area — Economic Opportunities for Youth — which included the development of the Youth Forward Initiative, which also uses a consortium approach to improve the livelihoods of young people in the construction and agriculture industries in Ghana and Uganda respectively.

The Foundation redefines its vision from ‘Making the economy work for everyone’ to ‘Opportunity for all to learn and prosper,’ bringing together its key focus areas of microfinance, and education and learning.

The new vision set a path of growth and optimism for the future and embodied the Foundation’s collaborative and values-driven way of working.

The Foundation initiates its Youth Learning strategy. Based on a broad review of the global youth education sector, the strategy focuses on access to both formal and informal education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Foundation partners with the Equity Group Foundation’s Wings to Fly scholarship program, supporting secondary education and leadership development.

The Wings to Fly program began modestly, providing secondary school scholarships to a few hundred young people; it has now become the largest secondary education scholarship program in Kenya and our initial commitment of 5,000 has doubled to 10,000 students.

The Foundation’s Board makes the strategic decision to focus its resources and work in Sub-Saharan Africa to heighten impact and take a long- term view.

Sub-Saharan Africa was identified because of both the opportunity and challenge: it is the second- fastest growing region in the world with an immense youth population, yet with the highest burden of poverty. Lack of access to quality education and viable employment opportunities point to the need for innovative programs outside the formal education system to help young people transition to sustainable work and economic stability.

The Foundation launches its first microfinance program in Africa in partnership with BRAC. Through this, the Foundation begins to develop its novel model for partnerships by embracing more collaboration and deeper relationships resulting in shared learning and broader impact.

The program has provided microcredit and livelihood support services to 2.8 million people; at the same time, it has demonstrated success in using access to financial services and microcredit to deliver programming to provide education and build agricultural and entrepreneurial skills. This initial program provided a scalable model that could be implemented in other African countries.

Mastercard International creates the Mastercard Foundation when it becomes a public company, with USD 40 million plus 13 million shares (valued at USD 500 million), for the purpose of advancing financial inclusion and education to improve the lives of those living in poverty.

The Foundation’s independent Board of Directors has provided autonomy in determining its own strategic direction and enabled it to take a long- term view with a focus on grantmaking.