Improving Access to Financial Services
What We Fund
Worldwide, our microfinance work is focused on promoting the development of social performance management tools to help financial institutions improve their ability to serve poor and low-income people and supporting programs to strengthen the capacity of financial institutions to use the tools. We also support efforts to find new ways to reach very poor households.
In the United States, our support focuses on three strategies:
- Developing and testing new affordable and responsible consumer financial products and services
- Building the infrastructure necessary to take financial products to scale
- Policy analysis and advocacy to produce a more supportive policy and regulatory framework for delivering responsive financial services to poor and low-income households. (We prefer projects that focus on federal policy and regulatory frameworks and have the potential to reach scale.)
Additional Selection Criteria
In the United States, we do not provide funding for housing finance, financial literacy or financial education programs, housing counseling programs, programs to provide loans to microenterprises or small businesses, or efforts to start new community development financial institutions such as loan funds, community development banks, or credit unions.
We no longer provide grants directly to individual microfinance institutions.
To Apply for a Grant
Follow these steps:
- Review the Initiative(s) most relevant to your work.
- Read our Grant Application Guide, which describes our grant-making process.
- If you determine that your work aligns with our priorities, submit a Grant Inquiry. (While we welcome submissions, please keep in mind that our funds are limited in relation to the large number of worthwhile inquiries we receive. In a typical year, less than 1 percent of unsolicited inquiries result in a grant.)
Please Note:
It is important that you use our grant inquiry form—and refrain from contacting program officers directly. Given the volume of inquiries we receive, this allows us to log, track and respond quickly to your application.
Fellowships
The vast majority of foundation grants go to organizations. We provide a very limited number of fellowship opportunities for individuals through the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships Program, which aims to diversify the faculties of American colleges and universities.
The foundation does not have any other active fellowship opportunities at this time.
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