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The Africa Jobs Fund is betting on export manufacturing and international migration to raise worker incomes.
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Africa faces an enormous jobs challenge. By 2050, a quarter of the world’s working-age population will live on the continent. But economies aren’t creating nearly enough formal jobs to keep pace.
One of the people working to address that challenge is Daniel Yu, the founder of African e-commerce company Wasoko, who wants to mobilize $100 million to create better-paying jobs for Africans.  His Africa Jobs Fund, a new philanthropic venture builder housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, is using philanthropic capital to build and back businesses that can create higher-productivity jobs at scale. One part of the strategy is familiar: help build export industries that can employ more people at higher wages. The other is more unusual: help African workers move abroad to places where the same work can pay dramatically more. Employment is a big issue in Africa. More than 10 million young Africans enter the labor market each year, while current growth patterns are estimated to generate only around 3 million formal jobs. And even closing that gap is only part of the challenge. Because having a job doesn’t necessarily mean earning enough to escape poverty. Of the roughly 304 million young Africans who were employed in 2025, 104 million — more than a third — were still living in households in extreme poverty, according to recent research by World Data Lab, the Mastercard Foundation, and the University of Cape Town’s Development Policy Research Unit. Nine in 10 were working informally. So the question isn’t only where millions of new jobs will come from. It’s how to create the kind of jobs that actually raise incomes. “Enough has been said and talked about in the abstract on this,” Yu tells me. “Let’s try to actually specifically incubate and back the firms that are going to create these much higher-productivity jobs.”
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Two routes
The two strategies rest on quite different ideas about how to raise incomes.
Start with export manufacturing. The case for it is relatively straightforward. The need for African economies to industrialize — and for more of the continent’s businesses to produce goods that can compete in global markets — is hardly news to anyone following the region’s economic development. Yu also sees exports as a way around one of the constraints facing businesses operating in relatively low-income economies: limited purchasing power at home. Say you start a shoe factory. Selling only to the domestic market puts a natural ceiling on how much you can grow. But “if you are able to sell, produce good enough quality shoes competitively enough to be sold globally,” Yu tells me, “your market size for how many shoes you could scale up and sell is practically bottomless.” It was the second pillar that surprised me more: helping African workers move abroad. International labor mobility — including pathways to jobs in Europe and the Gulf — isn’t something I would have immediately put alongside industrialization as a poverty-reduction strategy. Recruitment of African workers for jobs abroad, especially in the Gulf, has also brought stories of illegal recruitment fees, misleading contracts, and workers vulnerable to exploitation once they arrive. The Africa Jobs Fund, or AJF, acknowledges those risks and says it will focus on ethical pathways that reduce the role of exploitative intermediaries. But Yu points to a striking economic reality: The same worker can earn vastly different amounts doing roughly the same job in different countries. Take a Kenyan nurse for example. Yu estimates they might earn around $200 a month at home, compared with more than €4,000 (around $4,600) a month in Germany. Over the course of a career, he argues, that difference can add up to more than $1 million in additional earnings. “There is no other development intervention that you can do that’s going to increase the expected worker earnings by a million dollars. It does not exist,” Yu tells me. AJF argues the gains can extend well beyond the worker who leaves. In one example, Operating Partner Ben Hyman calculates that a Malawian worker earning $53,500 annually as a nurse in Germany could send just 10% of her income home and double the incomes of seven family members. Those remittances also bring foreign currency into the origin country, while returning migrants can bring savings, skills, and professional networks with them. AJF also argues that migration doesn’t necessarily mean brain drain. Hyman points to research from the Philippines showing that when new opportunities opened for nurses to work in the U.S., the increase in people training as nurses was nine times larger than the number who ultimately migrated. The prospect of higher wages abroad, in other words, can encourage more people to acquire skills — including people who ultimately stay home. More reading: Remittances far outstrip foreign aid. But can they replace it? |
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Taking the first risk
So what does AJF actually back? Three months in, the fund has supported 10 projects, ranging from existing businesses to ideas still being tested.
One example of AJF’s labor mobility investments is an Italian startup recruiting hospitality workers from Malindi, a Kenyan resort town long popular with Italian tourists and home to a sizable Italian community. Many hospitality workers there already speak Italian; the company is looking to place them in jobs in Italy. That willingness to start from scratch is a big part of the model. AJF can put as little as $25,000 behind an entrepreneur to spend several months testing an idea, while investments in more developed companies currently reach $500,000. I asked Yu why focus so much on starting new businesses when plenty of existing African companies need capital to grow. His answer: That very early stage is where financing can be hardest to find. “If you are looking to start a new business from scratch, especially in a new industry ... it’s going to be basically impossible for you to get a startup loan from a local bank or otherwise,” he says. AJF wants philanthropic capital to take that first risk, prove a business can work and, eventually, make it easier for commercial investors to step in. By 2031, it aims to mobilize more than $100 million and generate more than $50 billion in additional lifetime earnings for African workers. Yu is pursuing that ambition alongside Hyman, founder of Africa-focused recruitment firm Talent Safari. Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of Flutterwave and Andela, and former USAID Administrator Samantha Power are senior advisers. For now, though, AJF is barely out of the starting blocks. And Yu is approaching it much as he did in his previous life building a startup. “I’m still a tech founder at heart, right?” he tells me. “Let’s move fast. Let’s iterate. Let’s try things. And then, kind of build and learn as we go.” |
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Here we AGOA again
For more than a year, the Trump administration has been pushing a new mantra for its relationship with Africa: “trade, not aid.” But its own tariff-heavy trade policy has sometimes sat awkwardly alongside that ambition.
Now, one of the pillars of U.S.-Africa trade is set for another reprieve. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 370-48 on Tuesday to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, through the end of 2028, following Senate approval last month. The legislation now heads to President Donald Trump for his signature. Enacted in 2000, AGOA gives eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the U.S. market for thousands of products. It has been particularly important for industries such as apparel, where the tariff advantage helped countries including Kenya, Lesotho, and Madagascar build export businesses around the U.S. market. But the program has had a turbulent couple of years. AGOA lapsed in September 2025 before Trump signed a temporary reauthorization in February, retroactive to its expiration and lasting only through the end of this year. The latest extension offers a longer runway, though still a relatively short one. The last major reauthorization, signed by former President Barack Obama in 2015, extended AGOA for a record 10 years, giving businesses much more certainty to make long-term investment decisions. Whether an extension only through 2028 will be enough to encourage significant new investment remains to be seen. Still, exporters have welcomed the extension. Kenya’s principal secretary for trade, Regina Ombam, welcomed the move, saying it would give exporters greater certainty as they expand in the U.S. market, particularly for products including cut flowers, tea, coffee, and macadamia nuts. The uncertainty has also exposed the risks of building export industries around preferential access to a single market. Researchers at ODI Global argue that African exporters who had been reliant on AGOA should diversify, including toward Europe, China, and growing intra-African trade. But they make a broader point, too: Resilience will require countries to move into higher-value production and build stronger supply chains at home, rather than simply finding new buyers for the same exports. The AGOA extension buys exporters more time. The question is whether they can use that breathing room to build industries less vulnerable to the next shift in Washington. Background reading: Trump signs one-year AGOA extension, preserving US-Africa trade program Further reading: Inside the United States’ new ‘trade, not aid’ strategy in Africa 
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What I’m reading
Nigeria’s economy grows at fastest pace in five years on oil boom. [Bloomberg] Are debt swaps the silver bullet solution for Africa? [African Business] The International Monetary Fund agrees to a $2.2 billion bailout for Senegal. [Financial Times] 
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Thank you for reading this edition of Devex Invested, which was edited by David Ainsworth, copy edited by Florence Williams, and produced by Yula Mediavillo. We hope you’ve enjoyed the read. For any news tips, please get in touch: [email protected].
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