The charitable arm of financial services giant Mastercard Inc. is backing a $60 million project aimed at helping young African leaders, especially women, with new jobs in healthcare, small businesses, education, irrigation and more.
The five-year project between the company’s MA MasterCard Foundation and CorpsAfrica is expanding to 11 countries from the current six, the groups announced Tuesday. A quarter of the new Africa projects directly address health issues, including providing bed nets to prevent malaria, ensuring healthy lunches at the local schools, and building boreholes for clean drinking water.
Read: Why women need different financial strategies than men: ‘Do not think this is an old white man’s game’ Across the continent the average unemployment rate for African women based on 52 countries was 12.6%, according to World Bank data. But the rates can be much higher, and lower, depending on the country. In the same World Bank data, the highest was in Djibouti, at 39.34% and the lowest was in Niger, at 0.7%.