Visa Foundation

Visa Foundation

Visa Foundation seeks to support inclusive economies where individuals, businesses and communities can thrive.

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About Visa Foundation

Visa Foundation seeks to support inclusive economies where individuals, businesses, and communities can thrive. Through grant making and investing, Visa Foundation prioritizes the growth of gender diverse and inclusive small and micro businesses. The Foundation also supports broader community needs and disaster response in times of crisis. Visa Foundation is registered in the U.S. as a 501(c)3 entity.

Our Commitment

At Visa Foundation, we:

Work with a collective vision

Observe, listen, reflect, then assist.

We believe that genuine and transparent relationships amongst our team and partners allow us to bring a diversity of viewpoints, skills, and resources to bear on global challenges.

Challenge systemic barriers

Envision how much further we must go.

We seek to mitigate systemic barriers facing small businesses, particularly those led by women or people from underrepresented groups, in order to help ensure a more inclusive global economy.

Champion scalable solutions

Begin with the end goal in mind.

We strive to support partners advancing innovative solutions and promote initiatives which contribute to a more equitable small business ecosystem.

Approach and strategy

In April 2020, Visa Foundation launched the Equitable Access Initiative, a five-year, $200 million strategic commitment to support gender diverse and inclusive SMBs around the world. As a part of the initiative, we will provide $60 million in grants and $140 million in impact investments with a gender and diversity lens.

Visa Foundation believes that creating a capital continuum for SMBs is crucial for their sustainability and growth. As such, Visa Foundation aims to increase equitable and efficient access to capital at different stages of business growth, support gender diverse and inclusive small businesses, and promote inclusive economic growth. An additional goal is to influence the sector broadly to help move gender lens investing from niche to the mainstream.

Through its grant-making, Visa Foundation partners with organizations that provide capital, capacity building and support services to gender inclusive and diverse SMBs. Additionally, Visa Foundation uses grant funding to unlock barriers that prevent the flow of investment capital from reaching gender diverse SMBs.

Visa Foundation’s commitment to investing $140 million into intermediaries and funds globally is primarily focused on emerging markets, with a gender lens across the entire portfolio from SMB borrowers up to venture capital partners. The goal is to increase the number of women who control capital, the number of women entrepreneurs who can access that capital, and the number of women who benefit from those businesses as employees or customers.

Programs and partnerships

To advance our work towards a more equitable economic system for gender diverse and inclusive small and micro businesses (SMBs), we partner with leading organizations throughout the world. Our partners fall generally into one of three categories: non-profits providing support to SMBs, investors, and entities focused on the broader SMB-centric ecosystem. A few examples of our partners include:

Financially empowering millions of women-led micro and small businesses (SMBs) globally.

Over 5 years, the program aims to develop, test, and scale financial services to SMBs across a global network of partners while driving learning and insights to advance economic stability for women and their families. Since the start of our partnership in 2018, Women’s World Banking has reached 1.15 million women with a financial solution and expanded their global Network in 32 countries, reaching 69 million women.

Visit Women's World Banking

Creating employment opportunities for rural youth in Africa by designing a network of innovative and integrated agribusiness hubs to build entrepreneurial capacity and technical/managerial skills.

The envisaged outcomes include creating decent employment opportunities for youth with a focus on green jobs, realizing policy shifts, and enabling other development actors to scale up wholly or parts of this model.

Visit IFAD

Running accelerators to close the financing gap facing underserved entrepreneurs in Latin America, with a focus on food and agriculture innovation.

This program will build on Village Capital’s Women’s Entrepreneurship Acceleration Initiative, a collaboration between the International Finance Corporation, the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, and the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab.

Visit Village Capital

A racial equity and entrepreneurship initiative launched by producer and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams and partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

The initiative will provide Black and Latinx entrepreneurs with access to capital, mentors and resources. Prizes will be awarded each year at a national event.

Visit Black Ambition

Providing global insights and trends for structured private equity, venture capital, and private debt vehicles with a gender lens.

Project Sage seeks to understand the state of the gender lens investing field. The report is a tool for investors, fund managers and individuals moving capital to align with their commitment to women. Project Sage is researched and published by Wharton Social Impact Initiative and Catalyst at Large.

Visit Project Sage

Strengthening the gender diversity of local farmer cooperatives and their institutional capacity to make them resilient to economic shocks.

Over the three-year initiative, TechnoServe has increased the revenues of farmer cooperatives in India by 113% by providing women with critical business skills, creating market linkages and introducing alternative income generating activities.

Visit TechnoServe

Accelerating investment into diverse emerging fund managers in the United States.

VC Include drives returns to investors while also shaping a more equitable and empowered world. The VC Include BIPOC Fellowship for First-Time Fund Managers, the first of its kind, supports the next generation of high performing, Black, LatinX, Indigenous and women-led venture capital and impact funds to drive economic growth in new markets.

Visit VC Include

Additional partners

A selection of other Visa Foundation partners include

The American Red Cross name and logo are used with its permission, which in no way constitutes an endorsement, express or implied of any product, service, company, opinion or political position. The American Red Cross name and logo are registered trademarks owned by the American National Red Cross. For more information about the American Red Cross, please visit redcross.org.

News and announcements

December 16, 2020

Visa and Visa Foundation Extend Support of Minority-led Small Businesses

Building on Visa’s long-term commitment to this community, Visa Foundation today announced new initiatives to provide nearly $5 million in capital to minority-led SMBs, amid a second wave of COVID-19.

Read the December press release

April 6, 2020

Visa Foundation Commits $210 Million to Support Small and Micro Businesses and Immediate COVID-19 Emergency Relief

Visa Foundation recently announced a commitment of two programs totaling $210 million to support small and micro businesses, aligning with Visa Foundation’s long-term focus on women’s economic advancement and inclusive economic development, and to address an urgent need from local communities following the spread of COVID-19.

Read the press release