Africa Jobs Fund Launches, Aiming to Mobilise $100M Philanthropic Investment to Boost Workers’ Incomes by Over $50 billion

Africa Jobs Fund (AJF), the philanthropic investment fund, launched to mobilise $100M to create high-productivity jobs that sustainably raise incomes and transform quality of life for workers across Sub-Saharan Africa. The fund will be led by Daniel Yu, and housed at Renaissance Philanthropy.

By 2040, around 600 million of the world’s extreme poor will live in Africa, and with only 3 million formal jobs in Africa created per year, the gap between the workforce and stable employment is widening. Export manufacturing and labour mobility are the two most reliable and proven routes out of poverty.

To accelerate these pathways, AJF will back world-class founders to build commercially-viable pioneer firms that will create jobs at scale, aiming to mobilise $100 million in philanthropic capital across export manufacturing and international labour mobility. Based on the fund’s analysis, the investment across both pillars will seek to create income gains of more than $50 billion for African workers and more than double the lifetime income of at least 250,000 low-income people.

Export manufacturing. Industrialisation has been the proven pathway out of subsistence poverty for the past two centuries for countries as diverse as China, Poland and Mauritius. African economies show the same potential today: wage levels are now competitive with Asia, they have preferential tariff access into the US, EU, GCC, and China is in place, and global buyers are actively diversifying their sourcing.

Value-added manufacturing creates jobs and spreads skills across the local economy, builds supply chains and brings in foreign currency by connecting African manufacturers to global markets. For individual workers, the shift from subsistence farming to export manufacturing can increase productivity fivefold.

The challenge is that the first companies to enter a new export market face high setup costs: training workers, building supply chains, and finding buyers. The fund will help pioneer businesses overcome these barriers, enabling commercial capital to follow.

International labour mobility. More than fifteen million people migrate to high-income countries each year, and that figure is set to rise sharply as their ageing populations drive demand for tens of millions of additional workers in care, logistics, and skilled trades.

The economic benefits are undeniable; an informal worker earning around $2,000 a year in Africa can earn $40,000 or more in a high-income country. The challenge for low-income workers from African countries is that accessing this market means navigating opaque recruiters, predatory upfront fees, and inadequate training. Meanwhile, employers in high-income countries struggle with crippling worker shortages and can’t find reliable, trustworthy recruiters to provide them with properly trained employees. The highest-return migration corridors remain closed to the workers who would benefit most. AJF will back the companies building and formalising those corridors, unlocking the substantial economic returns of international labour mobility for African workers.

AJF is led by Daniel Yu, founder of Wasoko, one of Africa’s largest B2B e-commerce platforms, with a track record of having raised $145 million and serving more than 150,000 informal retailers. Daniel also serves as Board Chair of Malengo, a pioneering education migration non-profit that is deploying $20M in financing to help low-income East African youth pursue career pathways in Germany.

Yu is joined by Ben Hyman as Operating Partner, who started a leading African recruitment firm, Talent Safari. Senior advisors to AJF include Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of unicorn African tech firms Andela and Flutterwave, and Samantha Power, former Head of USAID and former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

AJF launches as a fund of Renaissance Philanthropy, the nonprofit founded by former White House science advisors Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg to design and run time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic funds led by field experts. Renaissance Philanthropy has catalysed  more than $533 million for science, technology and innovation in its first two years, and has launched  22 programmes and funds spanning AI, climate, health, education and scientific infrastructure.

Daniel Yu, Founding Partner of the Africa Jobs Fund, said, “Persistent poverty is at its core a jobs problem. Africa has hundreds of millions of working-age people reliant on subsistence agriculture or informal work that pays a few dollars a day. Those same people, in the right job at home or abroad, could earn significant multiples of their income. AJF exists to back the companies that create those jobs and opportunities. Nothing else in development comes close to the impact of getting this right, and that is why I am building AJF.”

Samantha Power, former Head of the United States Agency for International Development and AJF Senior Advisor, said, “In my time leading USAID, it became clear that helping people access better jobs, through international labor mobility and export manufacturing, is one of the most powerful tools we have to lift families out of poverty. The Africa Jobs Fund is pursuing this with tremendous rigor and ambition, and it is in our collective interest to do all we can to support and scale their investments.”

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Founding Partner of Future Africa, and AJF Advisor, said, “African founders have shown they can build category-defining companies. The next decade is about building the ones that put millions of people to work. AJF deserves the attention of every founder and funder serious about jobs and growth on the continent.”

Kumar Garg, President of Renaissance Philanthropy, said, “The Africa Jobs Fund is exactly the kind of thesis-driven, operator-led philanthropic fund that Renaissance Philanthropy was built to support. Daniel and his team have done the analytical work to identify the highest-return interventions in poverty alleviation in developing economies, and they have the venture-building experience to bet early and activate the founders who can act on that thesis.”