Daniel Yu, founder of pan-African B2B e-commerce and technology company Wasoko, has launched a philanthropic investment fund to back companies creating high-productivity jobs across Africa.
The initiative, the Africa Jobs Fund (AJF), launched under Renaissance Philanthropy, aims to mobilise $100 million over five years across two key poverty pathways: export manufacturing and international labour mobility.
Yu is joined by Ben Hyman, operating partner and founder of 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.
By 2040, around 600 million of the world's extreme poor will live in Africa. With only three million formal jobs created annually on the continent, the gap between the workforce and stable employment is widening.
Export manufacturing and labour mobility remain the most reliable routes out of poverty, according to the organisation.
AJF intends to create high-productivity jobs that sustainably raise incomes and transform workers’ quality of life across Sub-Saharan Africa.
To accelerate these pathways, AJF will support founders in building commercially viable firms capable of creating jobs at scale.
The organisation said industrialisation has been a proven pathway out of subsistence poverty for the past two centuries in countries as diverse as China, Poland and Mauritius.
“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,” said Daniel Yu, founding partner of AJF.
“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.”
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, founding partner of Future Africa and AJF advisor, added: “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.”
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