This guide is written for research administrators, grants offices, and institutional leaders evaluating the Mastercard Foundation as a potential funding partner — not for individuals looking for a personal scholarship. The Foundation is best known publicly for its Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, which funds individual students, but its institutional-level higher-education and research funding operates on a different model entirely and is what most research administration offices actually need to understand.
What Is the Mastercard Foundation?
The Mastercard Foundation is an independent, Toronto-headquartered global foundation established in 2006. It was funded through an allocation of Mastercard shares at the time of the company’s initial public offering, but it operates independently of Mastercard the company, with its own board and governance. The Foundation has built a large and growing operational presence across Africa, and the large majority of its programming — in education, agriculture, financial inclusion, health, and digital skills — is concentrated on African countries, alongside a smaller Indigenous-youth portfolio in Canada.
Unlike a conventional research funding agency (a national research council or a federal science agency), the Foundation does not primarily operate as a source of individual investigator-initiated research grants. It funds at the institutional and systems level, working through named partner organizations, program-specific initiatives, and, increasingly, prize-style recognition mechanisms.
Not the Scholars Program: A Quick Disambiguation
Because search interest in “Mastercard Foundation” is dominated by prospective students, it’s worth being explicit about scope. The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program provides individual scholarships and leadership development to academically talented, service-oriented young people, primarily from Africa, to pursue secondary and university education. It is administered through a network of partner universities and organizations rather than through direct application to the Foundation itself. If you are a prospective student, that program — not this guide — is the relevant resource. This guide instead covers how the Foundation funds institutions: universities, research centres, and higher-education systems, which is the relevant question for grants offices, vice-chancellors’ offices, and research development staff.
How the Foundation Funds Institutions: Grantmaking Model
Research administrators used to funders like national science agencies or major biomedical funders should understand one structural difference up front: the Mastercard Foundation does not run a standing, broadly open annual call for research proposals that any qualifying institution or PI can apply to at will. Its model is closer to strategic, invitation-based partnership: the Foundation defines a program strategy (youth employment, financial inclusion, health systems, higher-education transformation, and so on), identifies aligned institutional partners — universities, NGOs, governments, and multilateral bodies — and channels funding through those relationships, often over multi-year horizons.
The clearest current example of this at the higher-education and research level is a prize/recognition structure rather than a conventional competitive grant round — the Africa Higher Education for Transformation (AHEFT) Prize, described below. Institutions engaging with the Foundation should expect to build a relationship and track its program strategy and eligibility announcements directly, rather than treating it as a rolling RFP pipeline.
AHEFT: The Foundation’s Flagship Institutional Higher-Education Program
In July 2026, the Mastercard Foundation launched the Africa Higher Education for Transformation (AHEFT) Prize, an annual recognition and funding mechanism backed by a USD 500 million commitment over its first decade. The Foundation states it intends to recognize and fund at least 150 African higher-education institutions over that ten-year period, with each winning institution receiving USD 3 million to scale programs that have already demonstrated institution-wide transformation in areas such as research and innovation, teaching and learning, transitions to employment, and entrepreneurship, alongside priority sectors including climate and environment, agriculture and agri-food systems, health, and STEM/digital/AI.
The inaugural 2026 cohort of five laureate institutions, announced ahead of a Higher Education Transformation Convening scheduled for 22 September 2026 in Accra, Ghana, were:
- Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) — recognized for excellence in research and innovation
- Institut International d’Ingénierie de l’Eau et de l’Environnement / 2iE (Burkina Faso) — recognized for excellence in teaching and learning
- Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) (Ghana) — recognized for excellence in research and innovation
- Muni University (Uganda) — recognized for excellence in transitions to employment
- University of Rwanda — recognized for excellence in health
Each institution received USD 3 million to expand the programs that earned the recognition. Because AHEFT is a newly launched mechanism, the Foundation’s own site is the authoritative and only reliable source for eligibility criteria and timing of future cycles; institutions interested in future rounds should monitor the Foundation’s programs pages directly rather than relying on secondary coverage, since press materials at launch did not publish full eligibility criteria for subsequent cycles.
It is worth noting AHEFT’s structure explicitly: it recognizes and scales institutions that have already achieved measurable transformation, rather than funding a prospective, not-yet-executed research proposal the way a typical competitive grant does. Grants offices should not treat it as a direct substitute for a standard proposal-based research grant mechanism when advising faculty or leadership.
Other Africa-Focused Institutional Programming
AHEFT sits alongside a broader portfolio of Mastercard Foundation programs that fund institutions and systems rather than individual research projects, including initiatives in digital skills and youth employment (such as its work with pan-African partners on digital-skills scaling), agriculture and food systems, financial inclusion, and women’s economic empowerment. Most of this programming is delivered through named implementing partners identified by the Foundation’s own strategy process rather than through open competitive application, which is consistent with the institutional-partnership model described above. Research offices exploring a relationship with the Foundation should expect a business-development and partnership-cultivation process more than a proposal-submission process.
Practical Guidance for Institutions and Research Administrators
- Don’t expect a standing open RFP. Individual researchers generally cannot apply directly to the Mastercard Foundation for a project grant the way they would to a national research council, Wellcome Trust, or a comparable funder; funding flows to and through institutions and the Foundation’s chosen partners.
- Monitor the Foundation’s own program pages and press communications directly for announcements of new cycles, eligibility windows, and convenings — this is where an initiative like AHEFT’s future-cycle criteria will be published.
- Position institutional achievements, not just proposals. Because mechanisms like AHEFT recognize demonstrated, institution-wide transformation, grants and advancement offices should maintain clear internal documentation of outcomes (research output growth, employment transitions, health-system reach, and similar systems-level indicators) that a recognition-based funder can evaluate.
- Treat it as one funding stream among several. African research-intensive institutions typically combine philanthropic institutional funding of this kind with national research-council funding and sector-specific government funds. See CASRAI’s guides to TETFund (Tertiary Education Trust Fund) Nigeria and the South African research integrity framework for examples of the national-level funding and governance landscape these institutional grants sit alongside.
- Distinguish this from general foundation research grants. For a broader look at how philanthropic foundations fund research more generally, see CASRAI’s guide to foundation research grants for early-career investigators and the dictionary entry on a foundation grant.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Mastercard Foundation fund individual research grants?
Not as a general, open mechanism. Its funding is predominantly channelled through institutional partnerships and initiative-specific programs such as the AHEFT Prize, rather than through investigator-initiated proposals submitted directly by individual researchers.
What is the difference between the Scholars Program and the Foundation’s higher-education institutional funding?
The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program funds individual students’ education and leadership development through partner universities. Institutional higher-education funding, such as the AHEFT Prize, instead funds universities and research institutions themselves to scale system-wide transformation — it is not a mechanism for individual student support.
Can any African university apply to the AHEFT Prize?
The Foundation has not published detailed, generally applicable eligibility criteria for future AHEFT cycles as of this writing; institutions should consult the Foundation’s own site for eligibility and cycle timing rather than relying on secondary reporting.
Is the Mastercard Foundation part of Mastercard the company?
No. It is an independent foundation that was capitalized through an allocation of Mastercard shares when the company went public in 2006, but it has separate governance and operates independently of the corporation.
Is AHEFT a research grant or an award?
It functions as a recognition-and-scaling prize: it identifies institutions that have already demonstrated transformation (including in research and innovation) and provides funding to expand that work, rather than funding a prospective, not-yet-executed research proposal.
