After spending 11 years building Wasoko into one of Africa’s largest B2B e-commerce platforms, Daniel Yu stepped away from traditional startup hustle last year. But he didn’t retire. Instead, the 31-year-old serial entrepreneur just announced something arguably more ambitious than scaling a billion-dollar company: a $100 million philanthropic fund designed to tackle poverty at its root by backing early-stage companies focused on export manufacturing and international labour mobility.
Welcome to the Africa Jobs Fund,a moonshot bet that treating poverty as fundamentally a jobs problem, rather than a tech problem, might actually work. According to reporting from Tech Next 24, this bold initiative marks a significant shift in how the continent’s most promising entrepreneurs are approaching development challenges.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that prompted Yu’s pivot. Africa is projected to host around 600 million of the world’s extreme poor by 2040, while formal job creation lags at roughly 3 million positions annually far below what is needed to absorb a rapidly growing workforce. That’s not a number that fits on a startup pitch deck. It’s the kind of challenge that keeps policymakers and development experts up at night.
The gap is staggering. Africa’s working-age population is exploding, but the jobs simply aren’t being created fast enough. Most people remain trapped in what development economists call the “poverty trap”stuck in subsistence agriculture or informal sector work that pays only a few dollars a day. It’s not for lack of ambition or capability. It’s a structural problem that no amount of mobile money apps or e-commerce platforms has managed to solve at scale.
Persistent poverty is at its core a jobs problem,” Yu said in the fund’s announcement. 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”.
This is where the Africa Jobs Fund gets interesting,and unconventional. The fund identifies two sectors as the most effective pathways out of poverty: export manufacturing and international labour mobility. No AI platforms. No blockchain. No direct-to-consumer apps. Just the unsexy, labor-intensive work of creating real jobs that actually pay.
It sounds almost deliberately boring, which might be exactly the point. Tech founders and venture capitalists have chased high-growth, high-margin opportunities in Africa for years. But as Yu’s own experience with Wasoko demonstrates, the low-margin, high-volume business of serving Africa’s informal economy requires different capital, different timelines, and different patience. Most venture firms don’t have it. Most philanthropies don’t either.
Export manufacturing makes intuitive sense. The fund’s strategy rests on the idea that helping a single worker migrate to a high-income country could increase their earnings 25-fold, with remittances multiplying the effect across extended families. But here’s the catch: low-income workers often face opaque recruitment processes, predatory fees and inadequate training, while employers in high-income countries struggle to find reliable recruiters and trained workers. There’s a massive opportunity hiding in that inefficiency.
Through these channels, the Africa Jobs Fund aims to generate more than $50 billion in income gains for African workers while doubling the lifetime earnings of at least 250,000 low-income individuals. That’s not incremental. That’s transformative.
The fund isn’t betting on moonshot ideas that might go viral in Silicon Valley. Instead, AJF is focusing on backing early-stage, high-impact companies that can create jobs at scale but often struggle to attract commercial capital due to high upfront costs, such as worker training, supply chain development, and securing international buyers.
In other words, it’s targeting exactly the kinds of companies that don’t fit neatly into either venture capital or traditional development finance. The companies that are too commercially focused for pure philanthropy, but too early-stage and capital-intensive for private equity. The companies that need patient capital and real operational support to survive the tough years between launch and scale.
The fund is led by Daniel Yu and housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, an organization founded by former White House science advisors Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg. Yu is joined by Ben Hyman as Operating Partner, who started a leading African recruitment firm, Talent Safari, and the advisory board includes 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.
This isn’t a typical philanthropic advisory board. It’s a coalition of people who have actually had to build at scale in Africa (Aboyeji and Yu), who understand labor markets from the ground up (Hyman), and who have shaped development policy at the highest levels (Power). It’s the kind of team that suggests the fund’s backers are serious about more than just capital deployment.
After building Wasoko for eleven years into one of Africa’s largest B2B e-commerce platforms, which was recently acquired by Egypt’s MaxAB, Yu’s transition to founding the Africa Jobs Fund represents a significant shift in focus. But it’s not actually a departure, it’s a natural evolution.
Yu spent over a decade navigating the messy realities of African commerce: inconsistent supply chains, fragmented last-mile logistics, unpredictable market dynamics, and chronic capital shortages. He learned what actually works in markets where traditional venture scaling doesn’t apply. That hard-won knowledge is exactly what the Africa Jobs Fund needs.
What Yu seems to be saying is this: if we want to move the needle on poverty in Africa, we can’t keep waiting for high-growth tech companies to trickle down their impact. We need to intentionally build companies whose primary mission is job creation,and back them with the kind of patient capital and operational support that gives them a real shot at scale.
The $100 million is just the opening bid. Yu’s goal is to raise $100 million to invest over the next five years, which means the real test isn’t whether the fund can deploy capital, it’s whether it can find and support the right companies, and whether those companies can actually deliver on the promise of transforming livelihoods at scale.
It’s a big bet. But given the urgency of Africa’s jobs crisis, it might be the only kind worth making.
