Through Citi Foundation, Citi’s social investment arm, the bank works to promote financial literacy and entrepreneurship programs, which target local talent and aspiring entrepreneurs around the world, including Jordan. In this context, Citi and the Citi Foundation have been active players in the local community with more than USD 1.5 million grants extended in the past 15 years to several NGOs across Jordan for the benefit of young people from low-income communities and micro-entrepreneurs.
Citibank N.A. Jordan collaborated with Citi’s Inclusive Finance group, a group dedicated to providing banking solutions across Citi’s footprint, to advance financial access for 10,000 women across Jordan. The collaboration took place through one of Jordan’s leading microfinance institutions, Microfund for Women (MFW), which provides sustainable financial services that enable women in Jordan to achieve greater financial independence and resilience. The Fund offers small business development loans that average just $539 USD to some of the country’s most marginalized populations (96% of them women), providing them with the financial resources they need to start their own micro businesses.
Microfund for Women has received from Citibank N.A. Jordan $5 million in financing through Citi’s partnership with the U.S. Government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). The $5 million loan from Citibank N.A. Jordan to MFW will enable them to provide loans to an additional 10,000 underserved Jordanian women, increasing their number of borrowers by 7%. Greater financial inclusion for these 10,000 women is not just helpful for the borrowers – it will have tangible economic benefits to their families and communities as well.
Citi Jordan and Citi Inclusive Finance have partnered to extend a new $5MM in term funding to support the onlending to an additional 6,700 individuals, 91% of whom are women. Tamweelcom has received $5 million in financing through Citi’s partnership with the U.S. Government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). The funding is organized under Citi Inclusive Finance and OPIC’s $314MM Global Inclusive Finance Framework. Tamweelcom is the second largest MFI in Jordan, and has been supported by the Citi Inclusive Finance and OPIC partnership though Citi Jordan since 2007. Since the inception of the relationship, the partnership has supported onlending to 20,000 underserved women in Jordan.
In 2017, the Foundation awarded the International Rescue Committee with a $2m grant that will provide refugees aged 16 - 24 in Greece, Jordan and Nigeria with business training and start-up grants through the Citi Foundation’s Pathways to Progress initiative. Jordan’s share is half a million dollars of this grant.
Throughout the two-year project, Rescuing Futures, nearly 1,000 young people across three cities; Athens in Greece, Amman in Jordan and Yola in northeast Nigeria, will be supported to start their own businesses.