The Africa Jobs Fund (AJF), a philanthropic investment fund, has launched aiming to mobilise US$100 million to create high-productivity jobs that sustainably raise incomes and transform quality of life for workers across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Led by Wasoko founder Daniel Yu, and housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, the AJF aims to mobilise US$100 million over five years, lifting the lifetime incomes of African workers by more than US$50 billion.
By 2040, around 600 million of the world’s extreme poor will live in Africa, and with only three 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, which is why the AJF has chosen these two areas as its core focus. The fund will back world-class founders to build commercially-viable pioneer firms that will create jobs at scale.
The AJF launches as a fund of Renaissance Philanthropy, the non-profit 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. Yu is joined by Ben Hyman as operating partner, while 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.
“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,” Yu said.
Power said in her time leading USAID it became clear that helping people access better jobs, through international labor mobility and export manufacturing, was one of the most powerful tools to lift families out of poverty. “The Africa Jobs Fund is pursuing this with tremendous rigour and ambition, and it is in our collective interest to do all we can to support and scale their investments,” she said.Aboyeji, founding partner of Future Africa, and AJF Advisor, said African founders had shown they could 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,” he said.
Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, said the Africa Jobs Fund was 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,” he said.