Who We Are

AMF seeks to break the cycle of abject poverty in Africa. Working with its network of partners throughout the continent, AMF provides sustainable economic opportunities, access to capital and support for existing infrastructure.

AMF was created to bring sustainable long-term development to grassroots organizations in Africa. We encourage partnerships at the community level to extend opportunties to those who have been forsaken by traditional forms of economic development. Grassroots organizations are best placed to envision, articulate and implement their own plans for the development of their communities and countries. Community development cannot take place when human rights are denied; AMF believes that abject poverty is a denial on ones human rights.

Women are critical drivers of community development and change; community life cannot truly flourish when women are not fully empowered to resist gender-based violence and oppression.  Marginalized communities that are vulnerable to poverty and human rights violations are powerful agents of change and development when empowered from within.

AMF encourages the use of Microcredit Programs to provide individuals in Africa the opportunity to build small businesses within their communities. Microcredit challenges traditional banking practices to reach those entrepreneurs, visionaries and born leaders within the ranks of the forgotten poor.

While grassroots organizations are growing rapidly all over Africa, they still lack a unified voice and infrastructure to achieve scalable improvements in quality of life standards. AMF seeks to bring communities together by sharing resources and best practices to provide flexible solutions in hopes of breaking the cycle of abject poverty.

  What We Do

With your support we fund grassroots organizations working to promote health, education, economic development and social change in some of the poorest areas of Africa. AMF works to strengthen civil societies and to empower women and children.

AMF works with grassroots organizations that use microcredit as one piece of a whole plan for community development. AMF funds community development projects because they promote economic development, assist women, help people move out of abject poverty and create income that is most commonly invested by women in the health and education of their children.

“Money on the hands of a woman is spent better and goes further, leading to the development not only of the family unit, but society as a whole.”
                        - NELSON MANDELA, Global Summit of Women 2000

  Principles

Through our mission of extending grants and services to women lead grassroots organizations in Africa as a means of promoting economic, social and human development, the African Millennium Foundation has answered the development challenge of the September 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit. Attended by 147 heads of state, the Summit set out a clear agenda of reducing the world's poverty rate in half by 2015 – and to end these conditions altogether within the coming years. The Summit lead to the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Today, Africa is the world's most income-poor continent, with nearly 42% of the population living on less than $1 a day. The 2003 United Nations Human Development Report estimates that at the current pace, Sub-Saharan Africa would not reach the goals for poverty until 2147.

The MDGs are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions – income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion – while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability.

The MDGs represent basic human rights – the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter and security as pledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Millennium Declaration.

AMF is committed to the sustainable end of abject poverty hunger and disease. This means that we are committed to empowering people to create sustainable solutions that achieve the MDGs; we don’t want to content ourselves with charitable actions that only benefit a few. We are committed to pioneering the ways of thinking and working through which humanity can end abject poverty on a sustainable basis and ensure that these approaches become available to every poor community in Africa.