Mastercard invests $3m in African financial inclusion
The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity (FRP) is investing $2.8 million in three companies from Burundi, Malawi, and Uganda to support projects that expand financial inclusion in rural Africa.
The three companies, Prothem Usine, Pula Advisors, and Enviu BV, were selected from among 195 firms that submitted applications to the third phase of the Fund’s 2017/2018 rolling competition.
This competition is an effort to find and support scalable financial products and services for rural areas of Africa.
Financing for the last group of companies, assessed as part of the fourth and final phase of the competition, will be announced in early 2019.
Earlier this year, the Fund awarded $9 million to nine projects in the first and second phases of the competition.
The Fund portfolio now includes 33 projects spread across 14 countries in Africa. This latest round of support will extend agronomy, finance, and insurance solutions to excluded rural populations in the three countries.
“It is quite interesting to see how companies are leveraging technology, such as drones, to provide last-mile financial services to smallholder farmers across Africa and we are glad to see their innovations come to fruition,” says Wambui Chege, team leader of the Fund for Rural Prosperity.
Inclusion is the basis for building a prosperous world. Congratulations to Mastercard Foundation on this very smart initiative.