Activity Description: The Phoenix Fund is a social entrepreneurship fund focused on creating economic opportunity and reducing global poverty. The fund makes seed capital grants administered by Mercy Corps field offices to implement innovative economic development pilot projects led by local entrepreneurs. Country Directors and their staff manage selected programs, sometimes in partnership with local organizations. The Fund offers strategic philanthropists a strong social return on donations by providing quantifiable results from projects, and by leveraging successful pilots to maximize impact and scale.

Successful pilots provide proof of concept references required to secure larger agency funding for program expansion and serve as models that can be replicated potentially in multiple locations.

In Mongolia, the Phoenix Fund is helping develop and conduct small business trainings and provide micro-credit for young, educated, unemployed people living in rural areas who have compelling business ideas; in the West Bank, the Fund is helping turn young women - who represent the largest share of the region's unemployed - into entrepreneurs by teaching them how to produce and market olive-tree products such as soap and cooking oil; in Guatemala, Mercy Corps is helping newly titled, indigenous landowners pay off their short-term mortgages by giving them the tools and skills to expand into high-value crops such as pineapples.