the private sector, and governments from around the world to work in partnership to create 60 million new energy connections in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. Following this launch, USADF began awarding renewable energy grants to SMEs and African entrepreneurs and has since awarded more than $11 million to over 115 African off-grid energy enterprises to help combat insufficient access to energy across the continent. To date, USADF has leveraged partnership funds from All On, GE, and Nithio Holdings for this portfolio and held various funding challenges in this sector, including USADF’s Women in Off-grid Energy Challenge, All On-USADF Off-grid Energy Challenge, and Sahel-Horn of Africa Off-grid Energy Challenge. 2014 - Congress formally changed the Foundation’s name in 2014 from the African Development Foundation (ADF) to the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) to reinforce that USADF is a U.S. federal government agency and not an NGO and to further differentiate USADF from the African Development Fund and African Development Bank. 2014 - USADF launched its youth entrepreneurship portfolio in 2014 by funding 35 young Africans to start or scale their social ventures. This initiative was part of the Mandela Washington Fellowship under the U.S. government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). Since launching the entrepreneurship portfolio, which aims to help social entrepreneurs create employment, USADF has provided catalytic funding to more than 300 African youth entrepreneurs. 2020 - Through a partnership with Mastercard Lab for Financial Inclusion, USADF will empower thousands of smallholder farmers in Uganda by extending the reach of the Mastercard Farmer Network (MFN) platform, giving farmers digital access to markets, valuable inputs, financial services, and real-time pricing information. USADF and Mastercard in 2020 completed Phase I of the agriculture digitization pilot in Uganda and reached more than 13,000 farmers through two farmer producer organizations. USADF and Mastercard are created a follow-on Phase 11 to refine the model and scale its impact by reaching 300,000 farmers. 2020 - As the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the progress USADF had made with grantees across Africa, USADF developed its COVID-19 response strategy in early 2020. The interventions have sought to respond by providing grantees immediate relief and capital assistance, support grantees in repurposing and reconfiguring business models, and building grantees' resilience. A key component of USADF's COVID-19 response is the Capital for African Resilience-building and Enterprises Support (C.A.R.E.S) initiative, through which the Foundation, by June 30, had provided approximately $3 million for over