The Africa Jobs Fund established to raise $100 M in charitable donations
A philanthropic investment fund called the Africa Jobs Fund (AJF) was established with the goal of raising US$100 million to develop high-productivity jobs that improve workers’ quality of life and raise incomes sustainably throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
Under the direction of Wasoko founder Daniel Yu and housed at Renaissance Philanthropy, the AJF seeks to raise over US$50 billion in lifetime wages for African workers by mobilizing US$100 million over a five-year period.
Approximately 600 million of the world’s most impoverished people will reside in Africa by 2040, and the gap between the workforce and stable employment is growing as only three million formal jobs are created in Africa annually. The AJF has made export manufacturing and labor mobility its primary focus because they are the two most dependable and tested paths out of poverty. The fund will support top-tier entrepreneurs in creating commercially successful pioneer companies that will generate large-scale employment.
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.
During her tenure as USAID’s director, Power stated that it became evident that one of the most effective ways to help families escape poverty was to provide them with better employment opportunities through export manufacturing and international labor mobility.
“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.
Future Africa’s founding partner and AJF advisor, Aboyeji, claimed that African entrepreneurs had demonstrated their ability to create businesses that defined categories.
“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.
The Africa Jobs Fund, according to Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, is precisely the type of thesis-driven, operator-led philanthropic fund that the organization was established 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.
