What You Need To Know About The Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is the first foreign entity to be implicated in the violence witnessed during the protest against the unpopular Finance Bill 2024 and poor governance in the country.
The non-governmental organisation has been allegedly accused of funding the protests by Gen Zs witnessed in the country.
However, Ford Foundation has denied financing anti-government protests that began on 16th June 2024 saying in a statement that it has a “strictly non-partisan policy for all our grantmaking.”
Ford Foundation is an American non-governmental organization whose headquarter is in New York, USA with offices across the five continents.
The organization operates in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East.
The NGO was established in 1936 by Edsel Ford with an initial gift of $ 25,000 which has since grown to a sizeable endowment of 16 billion dollars (Sh2 trillion).
In Kenya, the NGO started operation in 1962 to aimed support open civic space, civil society and public dialogue with the government in Kenya and the greater Eastern Africa region.
The Ford foundation has since been at the forefront of championing emerging social, political, and economic issues including human rights, social justice, gender equity, and workplace equality.
The organisation has spent big amounts on philanthropy, funding the development of social justice centres.
Fourteen Kenyan civic and human rights organizations have received funds totaling between Sh1 million and Sh43 million since the beginning of this year, according to open source data on the organization’s website.
The foundation’s website hosts the grantmaking procedure and, in the interest of transparency, updates information on the beneficiaries on a regular basis.
The organization states that its goal is to assist in creating more civic space in the global south in order to reduce inequality.
It claims that one of the challenges facing this endeavor is that governments are marginalizing civil society groups on the grounds that they are pushing foreign interests at the expense of national values.
The major functions of the organisation internationally include:
1. Civic engagement
2. Promoting Creativity
3. Promoting free expression
4. Championing human rights
5. Advocating good governance
6. Investing in ideas with impactful mission
7. Advancing tech integration in the society among other functions.
The Ford Foundation claims to have backed revolutionary personalities such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and nearly 50 Nobel Prize winners, as well as helping to establish famous rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga is one of the most well-known Kenyans to have served for the agency.
