Daniel Yu spent more than a decade building Wasoko into one of Africa’s best-known B2B e-commerce companies. Now he is putting money behind an argument that cuts against the model that made his name: that Africa’s deeper problem was never a shortage of apps, but a shortage of good jobs.
Yu has launched the Africa Jobs Fund, a philanthropic investment vehicle targeting $100 million over the next five years to back companies that create high-productivity employment across Sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than fund the software and marketplace startups that dominated the past decade of African venture activity, it will concentrate on two harder, less fashionable sectors: export manufacturing and international labour mobility.
A founder breaking with the startup thesis
The framing is pointed. Africa absorbed a wave of technology investment over the past ten years, producing a class of well-funded startups and a handful of large valuations. What it did not produce, in Yu’s telling, is enough formal work. “Persistent poverty is at its core a jobs problem,” he said at the launch. The numbers behind that claim are stark: roughly 439 million people on the continent were living below the extreme poverty line of $2.15 a day in 2025, average unemployment sat near 9%, and Africa creates only about three million formal jobs a year against a far faster-growing working-age population.
The fund’s wager is that manufacturing and labour mobility can move people from informal, low-paid work into higher-productivity income in a way that consumer apps have not. It estimates its investments could eventually lift African workers’ earnings by more than $50 billion and help at least 250,000 low-income people more than double their lifetime income by 2040.
Why the structure is unusual
Just as telling as the thesis is the vehicle. The fund is housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, the US nonprofit set up by former White House science advisors Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg, and it is explicitly philanthropic rather than a conventional venture fund. Yu has said that structure lets the fund make long-term, higher-risk bets without the pressure to return capital that drives private equity and venture firms. In practice it plans to deploy a mix of equity, debt and revenue-based financing, matching the instrument to the business rather than forcing everything through a five-to-seven-year fund cycle.
That patience is the point. Manufacturing and labour-mobility businesses tend to scale slowly and capital-intensively, the opposite of the asset-light, fast-growth profile venture capital prefers. A founder who spent eleven years grinding through the operational realities of distribution across multiple African markets is, in a sense, designing a fund around the lesson that hard things take time.
The two bets, and why they are hard
Export manufacturing is the larger leg. Done well, factories absorb workers at scale, plug into global supply chains and earn foreign currency. But they are unforgiving to build. Manufacturers need reliable power, working logistics, trained labour, quality control to meet international standards, and working capital to bridge long production and payment cycles, precisely the constraints that have held African industrialisation back for decades.
International labour mobility is the more contentious leg. Supporting African workers into formal jobs abroad can raise household incomes sharply, and structured overseas-worker programmes have been income multipliers in countries such as the Philippines and Ethiopia. The risk is equally clear: poorly governed labour migration can expose workers to exploitation, high recruitment fees and weak protection. A fund operating here will be judged not only on incomes raised but on whether the work it channels people toward is safe and fair.
What it signals
The Africa Jobs Fund is small against the scale of the problem it names, and a $100 million target is a fraction of what closing the continent’s jobs gap would require. Its influence may come less from the capital than from the signal. When a founder of Yu’s profile says publicly that the startup decade did not deliver on employment, and backs that with a differently structured fund, it nudges the conversation in African tech away from valuations and toward income.
For founders, it is a prompt to ask what their companies actually produce beyond growth charts. For investors, it raises an uncomfortable but useful question about whether the dominant funding model is aimed at the continent’s most pressing problem. And for policymakers, it is a reminder that the work of moving people out of poverty still runs through factories, supply chains and labour markets, the slow infrastructure of an economy, not only through the apps built on top of it.
