Irene Kinyanguli, a senior at Arizona State University, comes from Tanzania, where her father works in a gas station and her mother is a teacher. “We did have the basics — food, shelter, clothing — we got what we needed,” Kinyanguli says. But an international higher education would have been out of reach without a scholarship.
Kinyanguli is one of more than 100 students at Arizona State on full scholarships funded by the MasterCard Foundation, which to date reports having made pledges of about $828 million for its four-year-old flagship scholarship program. The program, officially launched in 2012, is focused on developing young leaders from disadvantaged backgrounds who come primarily from the African continent.
“If I wake up tomorrow the president of Tanzania,” says Kinyanguli, a public policy major who spent the summer as an intern to Tanzania’s permanent mission to the United Nations, “MasterCard would have played a very big role.”
