About
To promote economic progress and improve the lives of people in low-income communities, including through financial inclusion, youth livelihoods, enterprise development, and support for traditional artisan and craft communities.
Citi's philanthropic arm in India; primarily financial inclusion and livelihoods, with selective arts funding (an IFA co-funder, e.g. Project 560).
Citi Foundation, the global philanthropic arm of Citigroup, has operated grant-making programmes in India since 1999, administered through Citi India's Corporate Citizenship function alongside employee engagement and local charitable contributions. Its primary focus areas in India have been financial inclusion, youth education and livelihoods, and enterprise development and microfinance, but the foundation has also run a dedicated, long-running programme supporting art, culture and heritage preservation, framed around the livelihoods of India's traditional artisans and craftspeople. A notable example is Desert Pastorale, an enterprise-development programme implemented with ACCESS Development Services to support artisans working in Appliqué and Khadi textile clusters in West Rajasthan's desert region, providing skills training and design support to help artisans access higher-value markets. Citi Foundation has been reported as having benefited more than 2.5 million people across India through its programmes over 16 years to 2016, spanning financial inclusion, livelihoods, and art and culture combined. Citi India has also been a corporate partner of the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), supporting an Arts Education programme and Project 560.
Leadership & Trustees
Initiatives & Portfolio
Named corporate CSR partner of India Foundation for the Arts, supporting IFA's Arts Education programme and Project 560, IFA's initiative mapping and engaging Bangalore's cultural landscape.
An enterprise-development programme empowering artisans of West Rajasthan's desert region, implemented with ACCESS Development Services, training artisans and orienting craft products for higher-value markets.
A 2011 grant to the Kolkata-based fair-trade organisation Sarba Shanti Ayog, supporting craft groups and marginalised women artisans across West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and the North-East through its RASA livelihoods programme.
Citi Foundation's global youth economic-opportunity initiative, delivered in India alongside its arts and craft-livelihood work.
Citi Foundation's cultural funding in India is distinctive for its consistent framing around livelihoods and economic empowerment of traditional artisans, rather than institutional support for galleries, museums or performing-arts festivals. Its programmes treat heritage craft skills as an economic-development asset requiring market access and design support, a structurally different approach from most cultural funders in this Atlas, closer to enterprise development philanthropy that happens to centre on craft and heritage skills than to arts patronage in a conventional sense. Its documented, sustained partnership with the India Foundation for the Arts also situates it within India's established arts-funding infrastructure, rather than running standalone cultural programmes independently.
[Atlas Perspective] Citi Foundation's arts and culture involvement in India is real but narrow, and consistent in its logic. As the philanthropic arm of a global bank, its CSR in India since 1999 has centred on financial inclusion, youth livelihoods and enterprise development, and its cultural giving sits squarely within that frame: it funds craft as a livelihood rather than art as an institution. It has been a named corporate partner of India Foundation for the Arts, supporting IFA's Arts Education programme and Project 560, and it has backed artisan-enterprise work such as Desert Pastorale in West Rajasthan, implemented with ACCESS Development Services, and the Kolkata fair-trade craft organisation Sarba Shanti Ayog.
The Atlas assessment is that Citi's contribution is distinctive precisely because it treats heritage craft skills as an economic asset for marginalised communities, an approach that complements rather than competes with the museum and festival funding of other patrons. Its reach is real: Citi India has reported that its art, culture and community programmes benefited more than 2.5 million people over sixteen years.
The honest counterweight is scale and visibility within culture specifically. Arts and culture remain a minor strand of Citi's much larger financial-inclusion CSR, and its cultural grants are not always separately reported. As a bank with deep Indian roots and an established arts-education partnership, Citi is well-positioned to formalise and grow a craft-livelihood and arts-education programme that already has a distinctive and defensible logic.