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Daniel Yu, co-founder of B2B e-commerce platform Wasoko, has launched the Africa Jobs Fund, a new philanthropic investment fund with a target of mobilising $100 million over the next five years to support companies creating high-productivity jobs across Africa. The fund will concentrate on two sectors Yu believes hold the strongest potential to reduce poverty at scale: export manufacturing and international labour mobility.

The Problem the Fund Is Trying to Solve

The Africa Jobs Fund's founding argument is that Africa's employment crisis is not primarily a talent problem. It is a job quality problem. Millions of Africans remain trapped in low-income informal work not because they lack skills or ambition, but because stable, income-generating formal employment opportunities are insufficient relative to the size of the working-age population. The continent's startup ecosystem has generated significant investment activity and a growing class of technology companies, but the aggregate job creation from that ecosystem has not reached the scale needed to address structural unemployment across the continent.

Yu's fund is targeting the sectors most likely to generate employment at volume. Export manufacturing creates jobs that plug into global supply chains and generate foreign currency income. International labour mobility, supporting African workers in accessing formal overseas employment opportunities, is already a proven income multiplier in countries like the Philippines and Ethiopia, where structured overseas worker programmes have contributed significantly to household income and national remittances.

The Backers

The Africa Jobs Fund has attracted backing from a notable group of supporters including Ben Hyman, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, the Nigerian entrepreneur and co-founder of Flutterwave and Andela, and Samantha Power, former head of the United States Agency for International Development. The involvement of Power, who led USAID during a period of significant Africa-focused development programming, signals that the fund is designed to sit at the intersection of philanthropic capital and commercially viable job creation, rather than purely charitable giving.



What the Fund Will Support

AJF plans to support businesses solving barriers across manufacturing, worker training, supply chain development, and global hiring pathways. On the labour mobility side, the fund will look at organisations helping African workers navigate the often complex processes of securing formal overseas employment, including documentation, language preparation, skills certification, and placement with verified employers. Yu has stated that the fund's long-term goal is to help create jobs that could increase African workers' total earnings by more than $50 billion over time.

Why This Matters

The launch of the Africa Jobs Fund reflects a growing recognition among African tech ecosystem insiders that startup growth alone is not sufficient to address the continent's employment challenge. Infrastructure businesses, manufacturing operations, and structured international labour pathways have the capacity to employ people at a scale and income level that most technology startups do not. For Nigerian policymakers and private sector leaders thinking about youth employment, the fund's framework offers a model that is worth engaging with directly.