Grameen Foundation USA

Our mission​​ Grameen Foundation enables the poor, especially women, to create a world without poverty and hunger. Grameen Foundation creates the space for women and girls to show up with their full power. Grameen works with women and girls to build a supporting ecosystem, using technology and innovation to break these barriers. In this way, we create the space for women and girls to show up with their full power. And they use this power to feed their families, pay for school fees and healthcare, and grow their businesses. Together, we expand these efforts so their families, and entire communities, can escape poverty and hunger.

Grameen Foundation's Vision is “A world free of poverty.”

Goal One: To scale and expand to additional developing economies Grameen’s most effective anti-poverty initiative, the Community Agent Network - an evidence-based model for empowering women and youth.

Goal Two: To pursue evidence-based, signature-program activities supported by mission-aligned donors to further strengthen our capacity to serve women and families in developing economies around the world.

Goal Three: To maintain a balanced budget and achieve revenue growth targets. Our leadership deeply values fiscal vitality and believes in appropriately paced growth that preserves our solvency and resilience.

We designed an international internal “Agents of Change Conference” to inform our work to scale and expand our most effective anti-poverty initiative: the Community Agent Network. With the objective of sharing knowledge and developing staff leadership capacity, the conference showcased internal and external thought leaders, and featured learning and data to help identify opportunities and gaps in this space and to inform strategies to better serve program beneficiaries. Managers are encouraged to build leadership development into their staff’s Performance Plans and provide time in the work day for staff to participate in webinars and conferences and share learnings with colleagues. We encourage staff to speak at external conferences. This allows staff to grow professionally and to contribute knowledge to global partners and stakeholders.

To improve top-down and bottom-up strategic planning, we implemented a new OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology for our team to use to set ambitious goals and achieve measurable results. To support our goal to pursue evidence-based, signature-program activities, we conducted an internal assessment of Institutional Relations strategy to more sharply define our focus areas, build our anchor grant pipeline, respond to increased focus on locally led development, and develop more opportunities for concept co-creation proposals with partner organizations. To help low-income communities in India, especially women, come out of poverty using scalable, innovative digital solutions, we launched a social enterprise called Grameen Impact Ventures, which has helped 1,141 low-income women to date become Community Agents and micro entrepreneurs. Because smallholder farmers, especially women, are increasingly harmed by climate change, we have elevated our focus on Agribusiness and climate-smart agriculture through research, new technological innovations, and by developing and filling a new role: Innovations in Agriculture Director. Building on our successful partnership with Celo to create Emergency COVID programming, we have co-created additional programs using cryptocurrency to safely provide funding to entrepreneurs in the Philippines to increase the resiliency and sustainability of their enterprises. To inform our work to scale and expand our most effective anti-poverty initiative, the Community Agent Network, we designed a new annual, internal “Agents of Change Conference.” Over a three-day period, all global staff participated in the conference which showcased both internal and external thought leaders, and Agents themselves to advance knowledge sharing, innovations and impact. To provide donors opportunities to make a significant impact within their areas of interest, we launched Impact Funds in three areas of focus: India, Africa, and Technology & Innovation.