New fund led by Wasoko founder Daniel Yu will back high-impact companies
in export manufacturing and international labour mobility.
Nairobi, 27 May 2026 – Africa Jobs Fund [1] (AJF), the philanthropic
investment fund, launched today 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 [4] 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 [5], 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 [6], 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 [7]. 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.”
