MacKenzie Scott's Africa giving surpasses $1.5 billion as she deepens ties with continent's top nonprofits

When Billionaires.Africa first reported on MacKenzie Scott's African philanthropy in July 2023, she had given over $1.1 billion to 104 nonprofits operating across the continent. That figure has since grown substantially. Scott's total giving to Africa has now crossed $1.5 billion, driven by a dramatically scaled-up philanthropic program that saw her disburse $7.1 billion globally in 2025 alone, her largest single year of giving since she pledged her fortune to the Giving Pledge in 2019.

Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and one of the world's wealthiest women with a net worth estimated at approximately $33 billion, operates through Yield Giving, her philanthropic vehicle that has now distributed more than $26 billion to over 2,700 nonprofits worldwide. Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, remains among the most heavily weighted geographies in her portfolio. In her 2025 giving round, sub-Saharan Africa received the largest share of internationally focused grants, accounting for 25 percent of gifts directed outside the United States.

Her method remains unchanged: no strings attached, no applications accepted, no reporting requirements placed on recipients. Organizations are contacted by an intermediary without warning and given complete autonomy over how to deploy the funds.

Several of the African nonprofits she originally backed have since received repeat, and significantly larger, second and third gifts. CAMFED International, which supports girls' education and women's economic empowerment across sub-Saharan Africa, has now received four separate grants from Scott, totaling $105.5 million since 2020. Her 2025 gift to CAMFED was $60 million, the largest single donation to the organization in its history, and her biggest grant to any Africa-focused nonprofit to date. The organization works across Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ghana, Zambia and Malawi, where its alumnae network runs mentoring, livelihood and community leadership programs that reach millions of young women.

Maliasili, the Kenya-based nonprofit that accelerates community-led conservation across Africa, received a $15 million grant in 2025, up from the $8 million it was originally awarded. That funding supports local conservation organizations across East, West and Southern Africa at a time when Indigenous peoples and community organizations receive less than one percent of all global climate funding.

One Acre Fund, which provides financing, training and market access to smallholder farmers across Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi, received an undisclosed new grant in 2025, adding to the $20 million it was first given in 2021. myAgro, a social enterprise providing savings-based agricultural services to smallholder farmers in Mali, Senegal and Tanzania, also received a new grant in 2025, though the amount was not publicly disclosed.

Scott's 2025 Africa grants were notable for their geographic spread and their alignment with the USAID funding crisis that erupted earlier that year. Analysts at Inside Philanthropy noted that 38 percent of Scott's 2025 grants overall went to internationally focused groups, with sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America leading, and observed that the timing appeared at least partly responsive to the gutting of American foreign aid, which left hundreds of nonprofits across the continent facing severe funding gaps.

The broader context for Scott's Africa philanthropy is one of sustained escalation. She gave $2.1 billion globally in 2023, $2.6 billion in 2024, and then $7.1 billion in 2025, a near-tripling of her annual giving rate. Africa-focused organizations have consistently been among the largest beneficiaries of each of those rounds. Her 2025 average grant size across all recipients was $38.5 million, up from under $10 million in prior cycles, reflecting a deliberate shift toward deeper, sustained investment rather than first-time discovery grants.

Among the original 20 African nonprofits Billionaires.Africa documented in 2023, several have continued to benefit from her expanded support. Village Enterprise, which ends extreme poverty in rural East Africa through a business training and seed capital model, received $7 million in early 2023. GiveDirectly's Africa Response, which delivers unconditional cash transfers to households living in extreme poverty in Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia and Malawi, has now received cumulative Scott support well into the tens of millions across multiple rounds. Amref Health Africa, the Nairobi-based health systems organization, received $50 million in 2021 and has used the unrestricted funding to weather supply chain disruptions and USAID aid cuts that hit East African health programs hard in 2025.

As Scott has shifted toward repeat giving, the scale of her individual Africa grants has risen dramatically. The data from her Yield Giving platform shows that organizations receiving a second grant from Scott receive on average more than three times the initial award, and those receiving third and fourth grants see the numbers climb further still. That pattern means the Africa organizations that built trust in early rounds are now in line for the largest gifts in Scott's history.

Since 2019, the total amount flowing to African nonprofits from Scott's foundation has grown from zero to a figure that now rivals the annual Africa program budgets of some of the world's largest development banks.