The Africa Jobs Fund (AJF), a new philanthropic investment vehicle led by Wasoko founder Daniel Yu, has launched with the goal of mobilising $100 million over five years to create high-productivity jobs across Sub-Saharan Africa. Housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, the fund will focus on two sectors it identifies as the most effective pathways out of poverty: export manufacturing and international labour mobility. AJF aims to generate more than $50 billion in income gains for African workers and at least double the lifetime earnings of 250,000 low-income individuals. The fund’s advisory bench includes former USAID chief Samantha Power and Flutterwave co-founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji.
Key Overview
- Fund Target: $100 million in philanthropic capital over five years
- Projected Impact: More than $50 billion in income gains for African workers
- Beneficiaries: At least 250,000 low-income individuals expected to see lifetime incomes doubled
- Focus Areas: Export manufacturing and international labour mobility
- Leadership: Daniel Yu (Founding Partner), Ben Hyman (Operating Partner)
- Senior Advisors: Samantha Power (former USAID head), Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave)
- Parent Organisation: Renaissance Philanthropy, founded by Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg
- Headquarters: Nairobi, Kenya
Daniel Yu, the founder of pan-African B2B e-commerce platform Wasoko, has launched the Africa Jobs Fund (AJF) — a $100 million philanthropic investment fund designed to back companies that create high-productivity employment across Sub-Saharan Africa. The fund, announced on 27 May 2026 and housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, represents a sharp pivot from Yu’s decade-long career in venture-backed technology startups toward what he describes as the single most impactful intervention in global development: getting people into better jobs.
AJF will deploy catalytic capital — using equity, debt, and revenue-based financing — into companies operating across export manufacturing and international labour mobility, two sectors the fund identifies as the most proven and scalable pathways out of poverty for African workers. Based on its own analysis, AJF projects that its investments will generate more than $50 billion in income gains and double the lifetime earnings of at least 250,000 low-income people.
The Scale of Africa’s Jobs Crisis
The fund launches against a deeply challenging backdrop. According to the World Bank, approximately 464 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were living in extreme poverty in 2024, and the region now accounts for more than 75 percent of the world’s extreme poor. By 2040, projections indicate that around 600 million of the world’s poorest will reside on the continent if current trends persist.
The formal employment picture is equally stark. While up to 12 million young Africans enter the labour market annually, only about 3 million formal wage jobs are created each year — a gap that continues to widen as the continent’s working-age population surges. Africa’s labour force is projected to surpass China’s by 2034 and exceed one billion by 2043, according to the Institute for Security Studies. Yet formal employment growth has lagged far behind, rising at just 6 percent annually between 2005 and 2023 against labour force expansion of 2.9 percent per year.
The Mastercard Foundation’s 2026 Africa Youth Employment Outlook further underscores the severity of the situation, noting that 96 percent of working African adolescents aged 15 to 17 held informal jobs and 40 percent were living below the international poverty line.
Two Pillars: Manufacturing and Migration
AJF’s thesis rests on two distinct but complementary strategies. The first centres on export manufacturing — the pathway that has historically powered economic transformation from China to Poland to Mauritius. African economies, the fund argues, now possess competitive wage levels relative to Asia, preferential tariff access into the United States, European Union, Gulf Cooperation Council, and China, and the advantage of global buyers actively diversifying their sourcing away from concentrated supply chains.
The shift from subsistence farming to value-added export manufacturing can increase worker productivity fivefold, the fund estimates. However, pioneer firms entering new export markets face heavy upfront costs — training workforces, developing supply chains, and securing international buyers — that make them too risky or slow-returning for conventional venture capital. AJF’s philanthropic capital is designed to absorb those early-stage risks and de-risk the path for commercial investors to follow.
The second pillar targets international labour mobility. More than 15 million people migrate to high-income countries each year, and that figure is rising as ageing populations in Europe, North America, and the Gulf drive demand for millions of additional workers in care, logistics, and skilled trades. For an informal worker earning roughly $2,000 a year in Africa, migration to a high-income country can mean earning $40,000 or more — a transformative leap that also generates remittances benefiting families and communities back home.
The barrier, as AJF frames it, is structural: opaque recruiters, predatory upfront fees, and inadequate training lock the highest-return migration corridors out of reach for the workers who would benefit most. Meanwhile, employers in destination countries face crippling shortages and cannot find reliable recruitment partners. AJF will invest in the companies that formalise and professionalise these corridors, matching trained African workers with verified international employers.
From Wasoko to Jobs: Daniel Yu’s Journey
Yu’s credentials as an operator underpin the fund’s credibility. He founded Wasoko (originally Sokowatch) in 2013 in Dar es Salaam and built it into one of Africa’s largest B2B retail supply platforms, raising over $230 million from investors including Tiger Global and Silver Lake, and serving more than 450,000 informal retailers across five markets. At its peak, Wasoko was valued at $625 million.
In August 2024, Wasoko completed its landmark all-stock merger with Egypt-based MaxAB, creating a combined platform operating across Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Egypt, and Morocco with a workforce exceeding 4,000. Yu stepped down from his operational role in September 2025, with MaxAB co-founder Belal El-Megharbel assuming sole leadership. Yu described his transition as a shift toward work he considers even higher-impact.
He also serves as Board Chair of Malengo, a nonprofit that has secured $12.9 million from the Shapiro Foundation and is deploying $20 million in total financing to help low-income East African youth pursue vocational and university education in Germany. Founded in 2021 by Cornell University professor Johannes Haushofer, Malengo operates an income-share agreement model under which students receive full upfront financial support and repay only after securing well-paid employment. The programme operates across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda and has been backed by GiveWell and Open Philanthropy.
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A High-Profile Advisory Bench
AJF has assembled advisors who span the worlds of government, venture capital, and African technology entrepreneurship. Samantha Power, former head of USAID and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, serves as a senior advisor. During the launch, she described helping people access better jobs through labour mobility and manufacturing as one of the most powerful tools available for lifting families out of poverty.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of both Andela and Flutterwave — two of Africa’s most prominent unicorn technology companies — and Founding Partner of Future Africa, also joins as an advisor. He emphasised that the next decade on the continent needs to be about building companies that put millions of people to work.
Ben Hyman, founder of Talent Safari, one of Africa’s leading recruitment firms, joins as Operating Partner, bringing direct experience in cross-border talent placement.
Renaissance Philanthropy: The Institutional Backbone
AJF is structured as a programme of Renaissance Philanthropy, the nonprofit founded in 2024 by former White House science advisors Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg. The organisation designs time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic funds led by domain experts and has mobilised more than $533 million for science, technology, and innovation in its first two years, launching 22 programmes and funds spanning AI, climate, health, education, and scientific infrastructure. Kalil previously served in the Obama White House and as chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures; Garg worked in the Obama Office of Science and Technology Policy before also joining Schmidt Futures.
Kumar Garg described AJF as exactly the kind of operator-led fund that Renaissance Philanthropy was built to support, noting that Yu’s team has done the analytical work to identify the highest-return interventions in poverty alleviation and has the venture-building experience to activate founders who can act on that thesis.
Why Philanthropic Capital, Not Venture Capital
A recurring theme across the fund’s launch messaging is the deliberate choice of philanthropic over commercial capital. Venture capital typically demands rapid returns and scalable unit economics — timelines that poorly match the realities of building export manufacturing capacity or formalising migration corridors in frontier markets. Pioneer firms in these sectors often take years to validate their models and achieve commercial sustainability.
Philanthropic capital, by contrast, can accommodate longer horizons, accept higher early-stage risk, and focus on catalysing systemic change that unlocks follow-on commercial investment. AJF is explicitly designed not as charity but as catalytic investment — backing commercially viable companies whose economics will eventually attract private capital at scale once the initial barriers have been overcome.
As Yu put it during the launch, persistent poverty is at its core a jobs problem, and nothing else in development comes close to the impact of getting job creation right.
Sources: TechCabal / TechMoran / Innovation Village / Launch Base Africa / Africa Private Equity News / TechCrunch / WeeTracker / Malengo.org / National Law Review / World Bank / ISS African Futures / Mastercard Foundation / Techbuild Africa
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