Established in 1999, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation (HGBF) is a private family foundation working to catalyze transformational change to improve the world and the lives of the most impoverished and marginalized populations.

They focus their funding in four main areas:

Food Security

Their food security work is focused on agricultural resource development for smallholder farmers, and they support a range of interventions from research on improved inputs and practices to advocacy to promote the best ideas that will have the broadest impact on the most vulnerable and under-resourced communities.

Water Security

Their investments in water security are closely aligned with their food security priorities, with a focus on water resource management to support agriculture.

Conflict Mitigation

Conflict and hunger are inextricably linked: conflict breeds hunger and hunger fuels conflict. They therefore invest in conflict and post-conflict countries to bring an end to conflict; to improve the conditions that fuel conflict; or to develop communities that have been devastated by conflict.

Public Safety

The Foundation provides opportunistic support to augment the public safety capacity of all-volunteer fire departments and sheriffs’ offices in the rural communities where they operate, including Macon County, Christian County and Shelby County in Illinois; Cochise County in Arizona; and more limited support in Nebraska.

Non-Strategic Investments

The Foundation continues to make smaller investments in areas where they have deep knowledge and relationships including initiatives with cheetah and mountain gorilla conservation and support for projects in the local communities in which they operate.

 

Where They Work

HGBF has worked in nearly 80 countries since 1999. Today they focus their work in three geographic regions: Latin America, and particularly El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico; Africa, and particularly the Great Lakes Region, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and agricultural research in South Africa; and the United States.