We’re excited to share that Anteneh recently joined Africa Jobs Fund as a Venture-Builder focused on manufacturing. Before that he was on the founding team of Komari Beverages (one of Ethiopia’s largest beverage companies), worked at Ethiopian Investment Holdings (the national investment fund) and got his MBA at IESE in Barcelona.

We interviewed him to get his thoughts on the Africa Jobs Fund and his experience since starting.

Subscribe now

Let’s start with a hard one. What were you most sceptical about when you first came across Africa Jobs Fund, and how do you feel about it now?

When I first heard that Africa Jobs Fund was a philanthropic fund, I was sceptical. Fairly or unfairly, I associated the word “philanthropic” with an NGO model. Over time, I had developed concerns about whether those models always use resources efficiently and align the incentives of donors, staff and the people they are intended to support.

More specifically, I wondered how Africa Jobs Fund would balance commercial and social returns. This is a tension across impact investing: how do you maintain genuine commercial discipline without allowing the impact objective to become secondary? And how do you pursue impact while still building financially sustainable companies?

What changed my mind was the elegance of the model. On the commercial side, AJF expects successful companies to return the capital invested in them, allowing that capital to be recycled into other businesses. On the impact side, it applies analytical rigour through measures such as cost per doubled consumption year. This helps us assess how significantly people’s incomes improve, for how long, and relative to the cost of achieving that change.

My original scepticism has now disappeared. Not because I believe every question has already been answered, but because I have seen the seriousness with which those questions are addressed. There is openness to criticism, a willingness to refine the model and a real commitment to applying the rigour consistently. Most importantly, I now get to be part of that process.

I’m sure you had plenty of great opportunities to choose from. Why did you choose Africa Jobs Fund?

Africa Jobs Fund is still a relatively new fund. It is not simply executing an established formula; it is proving and refining a model that it believes can work. The opportunity to join at this stage and help shape what the fund becomes was very attractive to me.

Many established organisations can offer you a clearly defined place within an existing structure. AJF offered something different: the autonomy to identify businesses and founders, examine new sectors and markets, and contribute to how the fund evaluates opportunities, measures impact and develops its wider strategy.

By nature, I am a builder. I enjoy taking an interesting idea, identifying where its real value lies and working out what must happen operationally, strategically and financially to bring it to life. At AJF, I get to do that with portfolio businesses while also helping to build the fund itself. That combination felt unusually well aligned with both what I am good at and the kind of contribution I want to make.

Tell us about yourself. How did you get here?

I describe myself as a tri-sector professional. I have worked in commercial businesses, government institutions and development organizations, and each environment has taught me to appreciate something the others can sometimes overlook.

I started my career conducting commercial due diligence and launching consumer brands in Ethiopia. I worked on projects for international companies and organizations such as Coca-Cola, Diageo, and the British Council, as well as local companies such as Zemen Bank and Edna Mall. In 2018, I joined the founding team of Komari Beverages, where I worked on analytics, financial modelling, pricing, and fundraising, while providing cross-cutting strategic support to the senior management team. Together, we launched Ethiopia’s first hard seltzer. Working with such commercial businesses taught me that profit is not inherently a bad thing. The pursuit of profit can create discipline, accountability and efficiency. The danger begins when profit is put above people, not with profit itself.

In 2022, I joined Ethiopian Investment Holdings, Ethiopia’s sovereign wealth fund, where I managed investment projects in logistics, energy, and climate finance sectors. I worked with portfolio companies such as Ethiopian Airlines, Ethiopian Shipping Lines, Ethiopian Petroleum Supply, and Ethiopian Electric Utility to develop bankable investment projects and attract foreign direct investment. My experience taught me that serving the public sometimes requires doing things that may never make narrow commercial sense. Reaching remote communities with electricity, connectivity or other essential services may not be profitable, but governments have a responsibility to citizens who would otherwise be excluded.

Along the way, I also worked with development institutions such as IFAD and One Acre Fund. Those experiences taught me that impact has many dimensions, including issues that do not fit neatly within either a government mandate or a commercial business model.

My original training was in engineering, and that has also shaped how I think. An engineer learns that a building is made of slabs, beams and columns, and that those are made of smaller components. You learn to break a large vision into its building blocks, understand how they interact and test whether the numbers add up. Over time, I realised that I naturally approach businesses in the same way.

Together, these experiences have prepared me to operate where commercial, governmental and development objectives intersect, and where the tensions between them need to be understood rather than ignored.

In your own words, what is Africa Jobs Fund actually trying to do, and why does it matter?

At its heart, Africa Jobs Fund is trying to elevate the incomes of Africans at scale.

Higher income is not simply about spending more. It gives people resilience. It can mean being able to access healthcare when someone becomes sick, eat better, pay household bills or withstand an unexpected shock. A good job is also a source of dignity. It enables people to provide for their families, contribute to their communities and feel that they have a stake and a voice in the future of their countries.

I feel this personally because I have experienced periods without work. Those were among the hardest periods of my life. Even if nobody explicitly excludes you, you can begin to feel that you are outside the larger conversations about your economy, your country and your continent because you are not contributing in the way you want to.

AJF focuses on export manufacturing and international labour mobility because these offer strong routes to significant income gains at scale. But we do not assume that every job created represents the same impact. We examine what people would probably have earned without our involvement, which is the counterfactual, and compare it with what they can earn because of the business we support.

Ultimately, the goal is not just to count jobs. It is to help create opportunities that meaningfully change people’s lives.

What does a venture builder actually do day to day? Walk us through what you’ve been building.

As a venture builder, I manage investments from beginning to end: from origination and due diligence through structuring and investment, and ultimately to portfolio management and measuring success. I draw on my experience working on the factory floor and at the point of sale, as well as in senior management teams and board rooms. This allows me to approach each investment from multiple perspectives as an analyst, operator, investor, and manager.

A large part of my time is spent meeting founders, asking questions and learning about new sectors and economies. Africa is not one market. There are countries and industries I know well, alongside others that I need to understand much more deeply.

When I meet a founder, I am generally trying to understand three things. First, does the business itself make sense? That includes its operating model, economics and position within both the African and global market. Second, is this the right founder to build it? What experience and capabilities do they bring, what is missing, and where could our support make a difference? Third, would AJF’s involvement genuinely be catalytic? We are not trying to replace conventional investors, so we need to understand what becomes possible because we are involved.

Internally, I am also helping build repeatable processes for managing our pipeline, analysing investments and evaluating impact consistently across different opportunities. I contribute to the wider conversations about how our approach should evolve and where the fund should go next.

So the work moves constantly between the specific and the systemic: understanding the constraints facing an individual founder while building the processes that allow AJF to support many companies rigorously.

What’s surprised you most since starting, good or bad?

The most positive surprise has been the team. There is deep curiosity and knowledge about development economics and how impact can be created at scale, but the thinking is never left in the clouds. It is grounded in the practical realities of building and operating businesses.

Both founders of AJF have been startup founders and operators themselves. The team can engage seriously with theories of development and impact while remaining focused on what a founder can actually execute. That combination of intellectual depth, practical judgement and competence is something I learn from every day.

The hard part has been learning to say no. Sometimes we meet an excellent founder with a genuinely strong business, but the company falls outside our thesis or can readily access conventional commercial capital. In those cases, AJF may not be sufficiently catalytic.

As someone who wants to see good businesses succeed, that can be hard. But discipline means recognising that a great company is not automatically the right investment for us. AJF should intervene where its capital and involvement unlock something that may not otherwise happen. Some of these companies will succeed, just not with us, and that is okay.

What are you most excited about in your work with Africa Jobs Fund?

I am most excited about playing a role in Africa’s industrialisation.

Several years from now, I would love to be able to say that we helped unlock an underdeveloped sector in a particular country, or backed a company that became a shining example of how to create jobs, treat employees fairly and elevate the incomes of workers, suppliers and surrounding communities.

Success for us cannot exist only in Excel files. It has to be visible in businesses becoming the version of themselves that their founders imagined, and in the lives that improve as those businesses grow.

Imagine backing a company that eventually employs 10,000 people and proves that a sector can compete globally. Other entrepreneurs may copy its model, improve it or adapt it, creating an industry where previously there was only an isolated business opportunity. That demonstration effect could ultimately matter as much as the original investment.

If we can help create companies that raise incomes directly while inspiring a much larger wave of business formation and industrial development, that would be an incredible outcome.

Share

Enjoyed the article and excited about Anteneh’s work? Check-out our website for opportunities with the Africa Jobs Fund, including our open venture-builder role focused on labour mobility!

Subscribe now

Most investors wait for companies to pitch them and then decide whether to invest.

At Africa Jobs Fund, we create the companies that we want to invest in.

Sometimes we have the idea and we put out a call for entrepreneurs and try to find a founder. Mostly though, we find exceptional impact-motivated entrepreneurs and work with them to figure out what to build.

This approach often involves spending quite a bit of time convincing the entrepreneur of our underlying thesis and why building in international labour mobility and export manufacturing will create much larger incomes gains for African workers than other sectors.

The key impact of this approach is that someone is now building in our space who otherwise wouldn’t be.

The same is true of our early-stage investments in existing companies - we’re most interested in making the investments that commercial investors will not. For example, funding a company to expand into an underserved market like Malawi.

But, why do these sectors need ‘venture-building’, why would entrepreneurs not build these companies and find capital without us?

Subscribe now

Build it or they won’t come…

Our focus areas, export manufacturing and international labour mobility, aren’t sexy. Talented founders in Africa don’t naturally flock to building garment factories and they certainly don’t go into labour mobility.

But the evidence shows that these are the highest-impact spaces in development. Moving a worker from a low-income country to a high-income one raises earnings 5-30x, the single largest income gain available anywhere in development economics. While export manufacturing and industrialisation is the only proven path to prosperity (except for having huge amount of oil).

So the most valuable thing we can do is pull more great founders into these spaces and help them get off the ground.

What does a venture-builder actually do?

Four things:

Scoping. Figure out which sectors, corridors and geographies are worth building in. It might just be asking Claude for an overview, but it might also be going to talk to cruise ship recruiters in Kenya or Namibia to understand the bottlenecks in their sector and how they might be unlocked.

Founder sourcing. Find exceptional people and persuade them to build here. This is part recruiting, but its actually much more fundamentally about convincing someone of our worldview and thesis. You’re both making the case for why someone should dedicate the next decade of their life to this project, while also assessing them as a potential investment.

Deal work. Build the cost-effectiveness analysis, model the income gains a company could create, and structure the deal. Assessing the businesses’ chance of success, its impact potential if it reaches scale, and our counterfactual contribution to that potential success.

Hands-on support. Concretely help portfolio founders go from 0 to 1. We don’t run any training programmes or lectures, this is much more focused on practical support. E.g. Flying out to Malindi, Kenya to help vet TVETs and partners for sourcing Italian-speaking hospitality workers.

The pace is quick and the bureaucracy is minimal. We aim to fund at least one new project every month, and venture-builders run these projects from initial conversations to investment themselves. The only thing they need from management is a (quick) final approval.

We’re hiring

We’re looking for a Venture Builder to focus specifically on the labour mobility side: scoping corridors, finding founders, and building the companies that move workers into life-changing jobs abroad.

You should be exceptionally talented, high-agency, hardworking and deeply committed to creating income gains for workers in Africa at large-scale. We’re particularly keen on candidates with experience in labour mobility (or similar), in Africa and in building successful for-profit companies. The role is remote, with a preference for candidates based in Africa, and involves travel across the continent and to destination markets.

If that sounds like you, view the full JD and apply here: https://africajobsfund.com/opportunities/venture-builder-labour-mobility

We would really appreciate if you could share this role in your networks so that we can reach the very best people!

Subscribe now

At the Africa Jobs Fund, we have a single core target, spending less than $10 of philanthropic money to double one person’s income for a year. If we can hit that, it would make us multiple times more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities (a vetted set of the most effective development interventions).

The catch is that techniques for the rigorous measurement of impact in global development are built for charities running programmes, not for-profit companies.

Subscribe now

Impact through companies, not programmes

Our model is to catalyse new businesses in export manufacturing and international labour mobility the two sectors we think can most effectively create large-scale income gains for low-income workers in Africa. We back world-class entrepreneurs with seed capital, network, and operating support, usually to build companies completely from scratch.

Companies scale in a way programmes don’t. Once a portfolio company is off the ground, it funds itself through revenues and commercial capital rather than perpetual philanthropic subsidy. And when one pioneer firm proves that a new model or corridor works, copycats follow, multiplying the impact well beyond anything we funded directly.

There are not many organisations that combine a focus on building for-profit companies with an underlying calculus rooted in cost-effectively creating impact. We think in many cases it could be the most effective way to generate positive impact with philanthropic Dollars. For those who want to dig in further, our full cost-effectiveness analysis is public on our impact page, assumptions and all.

Why measuring it is hard

The standard approaches to rigorously assessing a non-profit will not work for for-profit companies. Randomised-control-trials produces the causal, welfare-linked evidence that rigorous funders expect. But bolting an RCT onto a fast-moving startup imposes costs and constraints that can strangle the business you’re trying to measure.

However, most impact measurement in the for-profit space is too vague to properly convince cost-effectiveness focused philanthropists and non-profits of the substance. Light-touch reporting keeps portfolio firms nimble, but “we created 500 jobs” tells a serious funder almost nothing. How many of those jobs would have existed anyway? How big was the income lift, and for how long? How much of the impact can be credited to us versus the founder’s, the co-investors’, the copycats’?

As much as possible, we want to achieve the analytical rigour of the GiveWell-adjacent funding world applied to real, fast-moving, early-stage businesses. Ideally, finding unobtrusive ways to collect enough data on portfolio companies to properly estimate counter-factual impact.

Ultimately, the goal is a measurement approach that our funders trust and our portfolio companies barely notice.

We’re looking for the person to build this

We’re hiring a part-time M&E consultant (roughly 5-10 hours a week to start) to design this with us. The right person has deep expertise in impact measurement or development economics, speaks the language of cost-effectiveness and counterfactual impact, and has enough operating experience (ideally including experience in for-profits) to reach for the lightest method that still answers the question.

If that sounds like you, or someone you know, the full role description and application are here.

And if you have expertise in this area and would be keen to share ideas on how we ought to measure this then we’d love to hear from you: hello@africajobsfund.com

The Williams Brothers

Iñaki and Nico Williams grew up in Bilbao, sons of Ghanaian parents who came to Spain in the 1990s looking for work. Both brothers are playing at this World Cup but Iñaki was up-front for Ghana and Nico plays on the left-wing for Spain. In many ways, this is the story of the World Cup.

Africa has a record 10 teams at this World Cup. 114 of their 260 players (44%) were born overseas (mostly in Western Europe) and 82% play their club football abroad. For DRC, 20 of their 26 players were born in Europe and not a single one of them plays their club football in DRC.

Subscribe now

And the traffic runs both ways. France’s squad has 16 players with a parent or grandparent born in Africa; Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese and many others.

The win-win of labour mobility

There’s no getting around the first part: an African footballer has to leave to reach the top. The best coaching, the best teams the sports science, the depth of competition and the big salaries all sit in rich countries. Kylian Mbappe could not have become the player is today playing in Algeria or Cameroon (his parents’ countries of origin). A top player in Cameroon earns less in a year than Kylian Mbappe earns in an hour (~€6,300).

Of course, in a perfect world African leagues would rival European leagues in quality, facilities, funding, etc. and we hope that one-day this will be the case. However, in the world of trade-offs (the real world) this is not the case and for now everyone is much better off if African footballers have the chance to ply their trade in Europe.

Destination countries get the world’s best footballers, and their leagues are the richest and most watched on earth partly for that reason. Origin countries get a national team full of players trained at the very top of the game, they get national heroes (and probably some remittances in the process).

Then there’s the effect on everyone who stays. Children in Dakar watch Sadio Mané and are inspired to play football and join academies in their thousands (probably more than is ideal). All that ambition turns into coaches, pitches and organised youth football, whether or not any one of them makes it.

Now if we swap the word footballer for electrical engineer here, nothing much changes. He earns several times more abroad, sends money home, and creates incentives for others back home to train and follow-in his footsteps.

In some ways football is a special case, but in many ways its the same as any other form of labour migration.

More than money

It’s not just about remittances, many talented migrants later apply their skills and resources to do good in their origin countries, and football is no different.

Didier Drogba left Abidjan for France as a small child and built his career there. In 2005, minutes after qualifying Côte d’Ivoire for the World Cup, alongside the Ivorian team he knelt on live television and begged the factions in the country’s civil war to lay down their arms and hold elections. After a peace deal was eventually signed, he insisted a national team match be played in the former rebel capital of Bouaké.

"We want to have fun, so stop firing your guns,"

The Ivory Coast team’s chant after Didier Drogba’s speech

Another example is George Weah who left Monrovia for Monaco at 22, won the Ballon d’Or at Milan, and came home with the money, the network and the standing to be elected President of Liberia. (Who then slightly bizarrely appointed his former coach at Monaco, Arsene Wenger, as Knight Grand Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption, the highest honour in Liberia)

Neither man could have had their enormous impact back home without first having the opportunity to go overseas.

For those with two-left feet

Football isn’t a perfect analogy for anything. The odds and salaries are absurd, and there are of course other complexities to labour migration besides having a good right foot. However, it is a fantastic example of the ‘win-win-win-win’ of well-managed labour migration: the footballer, their origin country, their club in Europe and the wider public all benefit hugely.

The same might be true of an electrical engineer or a nurse. To access world-class salaries and training and colleagues they often must move overseas. But, through the remittances they send back home, the skills they gain, the new economic linkages they create and the incentives for the next generation, they can hugely benefit their country of origin. Meanwhile, their new employer gets a great employee and their new country gets a great new worker (and taxpayer). (More on this here).

Everyone accepts this logic when it comes to football, but perhaps it applies elsewhere…

“In the long arc of human history, development has never been a product of charity. It is built by those who go forth and export.”

Daniel Yu, Exporters Without Borders

We believe development comes from large, profitable, private-sector businesses that employ many people. Today we are launching a fellowship for exceptionally talented people who care about industrialising Africa. You will be placed in a key role in a manufacturing firm in Africa to build real experience, with the chance to help it grow or even build your own export manufacturing business down the line.

Subscribe now

Why export manufacturing

Extreme poverty is now overwhelmingly an African challenge. As Asia has industrialised and grown, the number of people living in extreme poverty there has collapsed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, while the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has fallen, the total has risen, and the region is now home to most of the world’s extreme poor.

Every year, 10 to 12 million young people enter the workforce, and fewer than 3 million formal jobs are created to meet them. Most end up hustling in the informal economy, not because they want to but because there is nothing steadier on offer. To lift the floor for the hundreds of millions living on a few dollars a day, we need more payrolls.

No country has ever grown rich on aid. They have done it by building businesses, and above all by manufacturing things the rest of the world wants to buy. Textiles first, and then moving up the ladder. It is the path that the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Mauritius, China and many more took. Sell to global markets and you are no longer capped by your small local market. A firm can grow as far as global demand will take it and it learns to match global productivity standards.

As wages rise in China and across Asia, the lowest-cost production is moving overseas. Africa, with the youngest workforce in the world, relatively low labour costs, favourable tariff access to the US, EU, GCC and China ought to grab this opportunity.

Just how much is at stake is clear from the countries that have already made the climb. In 1960, South Korea was about as poor in GDP per capita terms as Ghana (although not in terms of literacy, state capacity, etc.). Then it industrialised and built itself into an export powerhouse, and the two economies diverged completely.

And it’s not just governments that can start export booms. It can start with a single firm. In the late 1960s, a handful of Americans in their early thirties founded Floramérica, the first cut-flower exporter in Colombia. They built a multinational cold chain from scratch, negotiating cargo space with airlines, designing refrigerated trucks to handle Andean mountain roads, and learning to meet strict US plant import standards. Within six months they were exporting to the United States, and within three years they employed 400 people.

Then, once local staff mastered the trade they went on to start their own ventures, seeding an entire industry. Today Colombia is the world’s second-largest flower exporter, worth around $2.4 billion a year and employing some 200,000 people. One of the founders of Floramérica actually went on to launch one of Chile’s first salmon exporters, now a $6.5 billion industry employing tens of thousands more.

A few talented and hardworking pioneers can have a transformative effect.

These businesses are not easy to build. They are gritty, hands-on, capital-intensive operations defined by physical logistics. This is the opposite of building a SaaS business and there is no Y Combinator for export factories (until today…). But, the unglamorous industries are the ones that pull people out of poverty at scale, and they need talented people who are willing to trade a cushy office for the factory floor.

That is where the fellowship comes in.

The Fellowship

The Africa Jobs Fund Fellowship places talented people into real operating roles inside manufacturing businesses across Africa.

Anyone serious about this work should start with radical immersion: real time on the ground in a business, learning the things you cannot get from a policy brief or a business school classroom. You join a manufacturing business in Africa, take on genuine responsibility from day one, and come away with real experience and a real network in the sector.

You’ll need to commit for a minimum of one to two years, depending on your level of experience.

After the fellowship, some fellows may stay on with their business, perhaps helping them to grow. Others will take on a new venture inside it, like building out a new export line from scratch. And the most ambitious will hopefully go on to start their own export manufacturing business, with backing from the Africa Jobs Fund.

If you care about having a real impact: serious responsibility, a steep learning curve, and a front-row seat to how economic growth actually happens then I can’t think of a better opportunity.

We have seen it work

The programme is not entirely new. It draws on the experience of the GPI Sustainable Fellowship, run for two cohorts by Masika Ventures, who operate three businesses in Tanzania across agri-processing, export and related sectors. The fellows who have come through it have done serious work, and they describe it better than we can.

“The level of responsibility and trust I was given was considerable. The fellowship is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to change their life and work almost completely and gain solid skills.”

Giuseppe, who led the build out of a biochar factory in rural Tanzania

“If you want to be a part of operations that challenges what you know, puts you in the field from day one, and rewards hands-on problem solving, this fellowship will push you.”

Cherotich, who built an aquaculture management system from the ground up

Who this is for

The fellowship is open to early-career people and senior professionals alike, and we will match you to a role that fits your experience.

We are looking for exceptionally talented people who are comfortable with ambiguity, who enjoy operational problem-solving, who can move between strategy and execution, and who can handle real responsibility early. Most of all, people who genuinely care about African industrialisation and want to help build businesses that last.

It is for talented Africans who want to build at home. It is for the diaspora, the person doing well in banking in London or as an analyst in New York who wants to come back and build something real. And it is for anyone, from anywhere, who is excited about driving growth and raising incomes in Africa.

Apply, or get in touch

If you want to industrialise Africa, you can apply here: Fellowship Application Form

And if you run a manufacturing business in Africa and would like an exceptionally talented new team member, we would love to hear from you: Get in touch!

If you want to be the Fellowship Lead at Africa Jobs Fund then apply here: Fellowship Lead Role at AJF

To learn more about Africa Jobs Fund then check-out our website and please share this opportunity with your network so that no one misses out!

Share

We are looking for talented founders who want to help African workers access higher-wage and higher-productivity jobs in Italy. Recent legislative changes in Italy have created huge new opportunities for labour mobility and no one has yet built the companies to serve them.

Are you the right person to build a high-impact company training, placing or financing workers to access jobs in Italy?

Subscribe now

Why Italy?

Italy’s labour market is facing a severe workforce shortage. This challenge is expected to grow over the coming decades as birth rates continue to decline. By 2050, Italy’s population is projected to fall from around 58 million to 51 million.

At the same time, the population is ageing rapidly, increasing the demand for healthcare and long-term care workers. In 2024, Italy was estimated to be short of around 65,000 nurses, and that gap continues to widen each year.

Despite the growing demand, very few Italian companies specialise in international recruitment from Africa. Most recruitment agencies still focus on the domestic market, while international labour mobility requires coordinating employers, training providers, legal processes and government institutions across multiple countries.

This leaves a significant opportunity for the first companies able to build a trusted, scalable solution.

Italy Has Opened the Door

Italy has opened two main channels for labour mobility, one is the new Decreto Flussi programme, allocating 497,550 legal work-entry quotas for the 2026–2028 period: 164,850 for 2026, 165,850 for 2027, and 166,850 for 2028.

Alongside Decreto Flussi, Italy also now offers extra-quota pathways for specific categories of workers. These pathways are not subject to annual numerical limits, allowing employers to recruit trained and skilled workers from outside the European Union throughout the year when the legal requirements are met. Crucially, this pathway includes a carve-out for workers who are trained abroad in any profession, so long as they reach A1 Italian and take part in a brief vocational training programme. (Art. 23, post-Cutro decree)

We believe these extra-quota pathways represent a huge opportunity. Not only is it a great opportunity for African workers to fill shortage professions in the Italy market, for first-mover companies its an opportunity to shape the whole sector in a high-quality, scalable and sustainable way.

The business and impact model

At Africa Jobs Fund, we measure success through two lenses: the financial performance of the companies we back and the long-term impact they create.

Imagine AJF invests $50,000 to launch a new labour mobility company. The company successfully places its first 100 workers with Italian employers, generating sustainable revenue through placement fees and repeat hiring while becoming financially self-sustaining.

At the same time, each worker’s annual income increases from around €4,500 to €29,000. Across 100 workers, that represents approximately €2.45 million in additional income every year, or roughly €100 million over a working life of 40 years, while significantly increasing consumption back home through remittances.

For us, a successful company is one that delivers both outcomes: a sustainable business with strong financial performance and measurable long-term impact for the people it serves.

Each placement has a huge positive impact

A hospitality worker is a good example of the opportunity we can create.

Italy needs more hospitality workers, while Kenya has many trained professionals with limited local opportunities (some of whom even speak Italian already). By helping a hospitality relocate to Italy, we can improve their long-term career prospects while creating value for both countries through remittances, skills transfer and economic growth.

What you would build

The goal is to build a company that helps more African workers access jobs in Italy in a sustainable and scalable way.

Often, this starts from the demand-side, working with employers in Italy to understand their needs and then working back to build the talent pipeline. This could be a recruitment agency that works with existing training schools in Africa to find workers and then bridges the gap to place them with employers (while managing flights, visas, soft-skills training, etc.)

Alternatively, since there is significant demand on the hiring side and through the recruitment companies AJF is helping to build, you might focus on building a high-quality training school that teaches workers Italian alongside in-demand vocational skills to equip them to work in Italy.

We’re open to a range of models, but the key is simple, effective structures that are unit-cost positive per worker moved and are able to scale to work with 100s or even 1000s of workers each year.

AJF is building an ecosystem in this space so we’ll be able to support with partnerships, advice and capital to make this happen.

Who we’re looking for

This is a demanding cross-border operating role. The founder might be based in Italy or in Africa.

You do not need to have prior experience in labour mobility, you just need to be a fast-learner. Other requirements are:

• Fluent/native Italian language ability - working with employers or teaching Italian is difficult without being fluent.

• A strong business builder - able to build a well-run scalable business

• Values-aligned - motivated by the mission and creating huge income gains for low-income people in Africa (alongside building a successful profitable business)

• Committed for the long term - Ready to build and lead this company over the next 5 to 10 years

Experience in recruitment, migration, healthcare staffing or African markets is useful but not required.

How we work with founders

We back exceptional founders to build new companies from the ground up. We bring sector expertise, networks, and hands-on operational support. We expect founders to bring ambition, rigour, hard work, execution and genuine commitment to the mission.

We invest in two stages. First, a pilot and scoping investment in the tens of thousands of Dollars to validate the opportunity, test the core assumptions, and establish proof of concept.

Where that clears the bar, we follow on with a scale-up investment in the low hundreds of thousands to build out operations and place the first cohort of workers. We invest primarily through concessional debt and revenue-based financing, with equity or grants only in exceptional circumstances.

Get in touch!

If you’re excited about this opportunity then apply to build with us here - https://africajobsfund.com/apply/entrepreneur

Or get in touch with alex[at]africajobsfund.com

And if you know someone who would be a great fit - make sure to share this opportunity with them!

Share

Multiply these circumstances by a few hundred million people and you arrive at one of the more counterintuitive patterns in the global economy. Moving from a poor country to a rich one can multiply a worker’s income tenfold or more, the largest economic gain available to almost any person alive. You would therefore expect the poorest nations to have the highest levels of migration to wealthy countries, but in fact they have the lowest. A Filipino is more than 400X as likely as a Malawian to live in a high-income country, even while Filipinos at home have roughly 5.5X higher incomes than Malawians.

A helpful chart

The graphic below illustrates the current situation. Every bubble is a country, sized by its population. The horizontal axis is how rich the country is. The vertical axis is the share of its people who have actually reached a high-income country. Both are shown in log scale.

Look at the bottom-left corner, where the poorest countries sit. They sit at essentially zero; fewer than one in a thousand Malawians or Ugandans lives in a high-income country. Tanzania, Zambia, Chad, and Niger sit below the same threshold. These are the places with some of the lowest incomes on Earth, home to people with the most to gain from moving to high-income destinations, but almost none of them move.

Now follow the cloud as it climbs to the right. As countries grow richer, the share rises. This is well-exemplified by the Philippines, Morocco, Mexico, and especially the upper-middle-income countries near wealthy neighbors, where it peaks. Bosnia has 40 percent of its people living in high-income countries, while Albania is even higher at 47 percent. The curve flattens only once a country is itself close to rich, somewhere around 45,000 dollars per capita, and even then the share stays high, with most high-income countries still above 2 percent. Even getting rich does not switch off migration; it plateaus at a persistently high rate.

A well-documented pattern

This curve is called the emigration hump, first described by the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky in 1971 and confirmed with modern data many times since. Economist Michael Clemens assembled the definitive version in The Emigration Life Cycle, drawing on data for every country from 1850 to 2019. Emigration rises with income across nearly the entire developing world before it ever begins to fall.

This historical experiment has been run many times: Ireland, Italy, Spain, and South Korea were all major sources of emigration at precisely the moment they were growing fastest, and each shifted to net immigration only after becoming wealthy. Countries recognized for their previously high levels of migration like Mexico and Turkey appear to be past their peaks now, but the poorest countries on the chart have not yet begun the climb.

Why are rates so low

The desire to emigrate from low-income countries is extremely high. Gallup finds that more than 900 million adults would leave their country permanently if they could, and nowhere is that wish stronger than in Sub-Saharan Africa. The constraint is not the willingness to move, but rather the ability to.

Migration is often read as an act of desperation, but it is better understood as an investment, and an expensive one. Surveys by the World Bank and the ILO put just worker-paid recruitment costs at between one and fifteen months of destination-country wages. Add a passport, a visa, medical checks, flights, language training, and the recognition of credentials, and a formal pathway can cost several years of income at home. For a worker in the Philippines, an established system of agencies and financing supports those costs. A worker in Malawi has no such systems.

An investment that pays back tenfold should attract financing. But no bank will lend ten thousand dollars to a Malawian high school graduate with no collateral, against wages she can only earn once she has already left. So the investment never happens. The evidence that capital is the binding constraint is consistent across settings. In Indonesia, positive income shocks to poor farming households raised emigration: when households gain money, more of them migrate. In Mexico, the Progresa cash-transfer program increased migration to the United States. In Bangladesh, a bus subsidy worth a few dollars was enough to send 22 percent of treated households into seasonal domestic migration, with effects that persisted after the subsidy ended.

Capital is not the only barrier. When the economists set out to explain the hump in a 2018 study for the Journal of Development Economics, they decomposed it into its underlying drivers and found that much of it runs through general skills in the origin economy rather than money alone: development produces higher-skilled workers, and rich countries design their visa systems to admit precisely those workers. Points systems, salary floors, and degree requirements screen out the people who would gain the most. Network effects compound the advantage. Every migrant lowers the cost for the next one by providing information, contacts, and a place to stay. The migration scholar Hein de Haas describes these as the aspirations and capabilities of migration. Residents of the poorest countries have emigration aspirations but lack the capabilities and networks to access migration within their means. Development is what slowly unblocks this, which drives the slope of the curve.

How the few get out

If almost no one escapes the poorest countries through a deliberate economic pathway, how do the few who leave manage it at all?

The main legal channel by which someone from a poor country can reach a rich one is asylum, an architecture built for a different problem in a different era. The 1951 Refugee Convention was written to resettle Europeans displaced by the Second World War; only its 1967 Protocol extended protection to the rest of the world. It was never meant to serve as a system of economic mobility, and it does not. Three-quarters of the people in the world’s twenty-six low-income countries live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet of the roughly ten million low-income-country migrants who have reached a high-income country, 74 percent come from just four nations: Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. These four war-torn countries hold only 21 percent of the low-income world’s population, but their citizens are roughly ten times as likely to reach a high-income country as people from the other low-income countries.

And even this overstates how open the route is. Most of the world’s refugees never reach a wealthy country at all. Roughly two-thirds remain in a neighboring state, and nearly three-quarters are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. Even fleeing a war, the common way out of a poor country, seldom ends in a rich one

And now that route is closing. Across the rich world, asylum and refugee admissions are being tightened sharply, narrowing the one channel that has carried most migration from the poorest countries. While these humanitarian pathways are being squeezed, different channels based on economic contribution are being rapidly expanded: recruitment led by employers in destination countries to fill recognized gaps in their workforces. The opportunity now is for low-income countries to establish capabilities and prepare their workers to meet that demand.

Counterintuitive conclusions

Aid will not stop migration. Europe has spent billions on programs intended to keep people home by developing their countries, the familiar “address the root causes” agenda. However the evidence indicates the exact opposite, with successful economic development driving countries higher up the emigration hump. Development aid is worth pursuing for many reasons. Suppressing migration is not one of them.

Africa’s working-age population will grow by hundreds of millions as incomes slowly rise, which is to say its countries will spend the coming decades climbing the left slope of the migration hump. The result will be more migration, not less. The task therefore is for destination countries to design and build orderly migration pathways or suffer the consequences of disorderly ones. Voters, the research suggests, are not opposed to migration in its entirety; they support orderly labor migration tied to clear public benefit while recoiling from the disorderly kind. Where no organized economic pathway exists, people attempt other pathways anyway, which are the channels most likely to provoke a political backlash. Building orderly pathways are therefore not only the humane choice but the politically durable one.

Destination governments are, in fact, already building them. Germany’s 2024 Skilled Immigration Act introduced a points-based Opportunity Card that lets qualified workers enter the country to look for a job without an offer in hand, judged on their skills rather than their nationality. Italy, under a right-wing government elected on a promise to control its borders, has at the same time expanded legal labor migration, authorizing nearly half a million work visas for non-EU nationals between 2026 and 2028. It has gone further still, creating an uncapped route for workers who complete an approved training course in their home country and reach basic Italian ability who can then be hired at any time of year, outside the quotas entirely. These schemes admit workers who meet a qualification bar, whether they come from a rich country or a poor one. The same democracies tightening asylum routes are widening targeted worker recruitment.

A market failure, not a preference

Rich countries are aging, their workforces are shrinking, and the shortages are most acute in work that is hardest to automate or outsource: healthcare, construction, and skilled trades. Remote work, once imagined as the way to employ developing-country labor without anyone moving, is already being eroded by the current set of AI capabilities. However the need to physically relocate people to perform essential work is intensifying.

It is a market failure that access to these essential jobs in high-income countries goes unfinanced and unbuilt for African workers. The failure persists because the gains are split across disparate parties and because no pioneer firm has yet borne the cold-start cost of building the services that would connect them. That is precisely the gap where Africa Jobs Fund intervenes, by pairing catalytic capital with determined founders.

Values-aligned entrepreneurs can formalize the demand side, turning latent labor shortages in rich countries into concrete, accessible openings for workers who have been shut out of them. Each barrier in the way is a removable friction and a company waiting to be built. Three particular areas stand out:

First is financing. A high-school graduate in Malawi cannot borrow the thousands of dollars a move requires, because her future wages sit in a country no local bank can reach. Yet that is exactly what makes the problem solvable: once she is working in the destination country, repayment can be collected through a functioning payroll and legal system. So the company to build is an emigration lender: one that covers a worker’s upfront costs, the training, exams, visa, and flights. This financial product operates on the same logic as the massive $4 trillion student financing industry, except with far higher gains for the average participant. This is the model the non-profit Malengo (where I serve as board chair) has proven, financing low-income East African students to study and work in Germany, where we expect successful graduates to increase their lifetime earnings by over $2 million each. Its early trial results are remarkable, and similar organizations lending at scale and recycling repaid capital into new loans, could reach far more people.

The second is training. Destination countries do not want just any workers; they want qualified ones. Germany admits people who reach an intermediate level of German for vocational training pathways, and Italy now lets workers who complete an approved short vocational course and reach basic Italian in origin countries bypass its quotas entirely. Clearing that bar is a business in its own right: low-cost, high-volume language and vocational schools, increasingly online, that can take African school graduates from zero to job-ready, whether that means B2-level German for a nursing post or a welding certificate a European employer will recognize. Ample training pipeline reduces the difficultly of finding eligible candidates for pathways that are currently underutilized.

However perhaps the most critical and currently underbuilt part of the labor mobility value chain is demand access. Job openings in rich nations exist, but they are scattered across dozens of countries and buried behind employers, agencies, and paperwork, invisible to the African workers who could fill them. We need solutions focused on destination country employers to make it as frictionless as possible for them to hire qualified but underrepresented workers from low-income countries. This means founders and businesses that can build trust with these employers to understand their talent needs and collaborate to fill required roles, while also handling the paperwork, compliance, and logistics end to end. We need the businesses that would allow a fifty-person German engineering firm to seamlessly hire and onboard a qualified Malawian welder as their next team member.

The cost-effectiveness case for supporting these categories of ventures is extremely strong. Helping a Malawian who could never otherwise have afforded to emigrate increase their lifetime income by potentially millions of dollars can be highly attributed to whoever removed the barriers. Because these are real businesses, we expect they will repay much of the money that launches them, so each philanthropic dollar can be put back to work again and again. Better targeting and recoverable capital together are why well-built labor-mobility ventures can be several times more cost-effective than even GiveWell’s current top charities.

These organizations will be built by entrepreneurs, one company and one pathway at a time. At Africa Jobs Fund we back exactly those founders: the people building the connections that let the next worker move along a legal, deliberate pathway, rather than waiting decades for development to open one. That the poorest countries send the fewest migrants is a market gap, and one of the largest economic and welfare growth opportunities in the world. We’re ready to back the entrepreneurs to unlock this uplift for millions of African workers.

Further Reading

The Emigration Life Cycle (Michael Clemens, CGD)

“Emigration tends to rise as poor countries get richer, all the way until they reach upper-middle income status.”

Migration and Development: Dissecting the Anatomy of the Mobility Transition (Dao, Docquier, Parsons, Peri)

Deterring Emigration with Foreign Aid (Clemens & Postel, CGD)

“Successful development in low-income countries is associated with rising emigration, typically for generations.”

A Theory of Migration: the Aspirations-Capabilities Framework (Hein de Haas)

In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular (Alexander Kustov)

The hump chart is our own analysis: each country’s emigrants living in high-income countries (UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024) divided by its population, plotted against GDP per capita in PPP dollars (World Bank), via Our World in Data.

Subscribe now

Billions of dollars of new philanthropic capital may soon flow towards Africa.

Nan Ransohoff’s recent article “The third wave of American philanthropy” highlights the impending wave of new philanthropy as a result of the rapid growth of Anthropic and OpenAI. She suggests we may see roughly another $50bn of annual philanthropic spending from the US.

I think it’s plausible that 10% of that money, ~$5bn a year, ends up going to projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly doubling total private philanthropy into the region.

In this first piece I look at the scale of this new funding, why so much of it is likely to go to Africa, how it relates to what has gone before and the call to action that it represents.

In part 2, I’ll outline where I think this money can most effectively be deployed. So make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it!

Subscribe now

Money, Money, Money

Where’s all this money coming from?

Nan’s estimate is based on the total existing assets committed to philanthropy of the OpenAI Foundation (which owns 26% of OpenAI), Anthropic’s co-founders (who own 12-18% of Anthropic) and Anthropic’s employees:

“~$370B in total philanthropic assets using today’s OAI and Anthropic valuations:

• OpenAI Foundation: Current valuation of $850B * 26% = ~$220B total.

• Anthropic founders: 7 co-founders have a combined ~12-18% of the company, and have pledged 80% of their wealth. So $900B current valuation * 13% * 80% = ~$90B total.

• Anthropic employees: Anthropic has an aggressive philanthropic matching program. This source estimates $20-$40B in employee DAFs based on a $350B valuation, which has since increased to $900B. Let’s be conservative and call it ~$60B total.

• Let’s imagine everyone would like to spend ~10% per year, assuming they can find great things to spend it on. So, $370B * 10%= $37B per year.

  • Why 10%? Foundations payout on average 5-9% per year. DAFs payout on average 20-25% per year. So, 10% is pretty conservative by these numbers”

Nan predicts $37B–$100B in new philanthropic funding as a result of this.

It’s possible that the above estimate is too high, as valuations could go down, accessing liquidity can be slow, and philanthropic spending takes time (and many of the people working at AI labs are quite busy at the moment for obvious reasons).

On the other hand, it also undercounts various other new sources of philanthropic funding:

• The wealth of OpenAI employees and employees at other firms (e.g. SpaceX)

• The new wealth of philanthropically minded investors: e.g. Coefficient Giving through Dustin Moskovitz holds $3-9bn in Anthropic stock and former Skype founder Jaan Tallinn owns $2-6bn. Both are members of Founders Pledge.

• Bumper earnings at quant trading firms such as Jane Street, which made net trading revenues of $10bn in 2023, $20bn in 2024, and a whopping $40bn in 2025. This results in huge payouts to their teams, many of whom are committed philanthropists.

Either way, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of new philanthropic money on the way, but is any of it going to end up in Africa?

Why would any of it end up in Africa?

Many of the people at Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street and elsewhere hold personal views influenced by Effective Altruism, Progress Studies and similar frameworks for doing good in the world.

For those who are not familiar, a one-sentence summary of Effective Altruism would be something like “Using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

Effective Altruists’ key focus areas tend to be on AI safety, other existential risks (such as pandemics and nuclear war), animal welfare and global development, while those of a Progress Studies bent might focus more on frontier technology and government reform in the United States.

There’s no time to go into all of these areas, but the logic for why these people end up focusing on global development is relatively simple: If all humans are of equal moral worth, you can do far more good per dollar spent by focusing on helping someone in extreme poverty than by helping someone who is already wealthy.

Back in 2021, roughly 44% of Effective Altruism funding was going towards global health and development work. That relative share has likely fallen as greater emphasis has been placed on AI safety and other focus areas, so it might be more like 30% now.

But what we really need to know is what proportion of those at Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street, etc. are interested in funding global development work (whether through Effective Altruism or otherwise).

All 7 Anthropic co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth to good causes. Of those, two have publicly signed the Giving What We Can pledge (an EA organisation that directs 60+% of its donations to global development), one is married to the former President of Coefficient Giving (an EA Fund that directs 30+% to global development), and the other co-founders are rumoured to be sympathetic to effective altruism, though this is not public knowledge.

Much of the senior team at Anthropic is likely to reflect the attitudes of management. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Foundation is no longer led by EAs (since the Sam Altman saga in 2023) but their literature does focus on “benefitting all humanity” and they are very likely to have an interest in global development.

With that, let’s try and estimate the rough scale of the resources that are likely to be directed towards Africa.

Let’s assume 50% of new wealth-holders are interested in global development, and those people direct 30% of their donations towards it, then we end up with 15% of the total pie going towards global development.

15% of $50bn, gets us to $7.5bn going towards global development in general.

And if you’re someone who cares about taking effective steps to improve the quality of life of the world’s poorest people, then you’re inevitably going to end up focusing most of your resources on Africa. Rapid economic growth in East and South Asia over the last few decades has lifted most of their population out of extreme poverty. This means that extreme poverty is increasingly limited only to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is therefore likely to be the focus of most of this philanthropy.

So, if you assume Sub-Saharan Africa is the focus of two thirds of that global development work, you get an influx of $5bn a year.

This would equate to roughly 10% of this new wave of AI-driven philanthropic spending. It would also nearly double total philanthropy into Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Third Wave of American Philanthropy in Africa

How does this new wave of American philanthropy fit in with what has gone before?

Nan identifies three waves of American philanthropy, each of which has also had its own distinct contribution in Africa:

Wave 1: Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and others led the way with money from industrial ventures in the late 19th century.

The very first work any of these entities did in Africa was Rockefeller Foundation’s “West African Yellow Fever Commission” formed in 1925. Through centres in Nigeria and Ghana, they managed to isolate the disease, ship it back to Rockefeller labs in New York and eventually produce the world’s first scalable yellow fever vaccine in 1937, of which 850m doses have since been distributed globally. For anyone who owns one of those pesky yellow booklets, you know who to thank!

Rockefeller Foundation’s other crowning achievement was the Green Revolution. Its work on crop research, including setting up Nigeria’s IITA, is credited with averting hundreds of millions of deaths from famine.

However, (as the chart showed) the absolute scale of private philanthropy from the US to Sub-Saharan Africa - led by Rockefeller and Ford foundations - was relatively small throughout the 20th century.

Wave 2: Gates and other 2000s billionaires primarily made their money from software and computers from the 90s onwards.

Launched in 2000, the Gates Foundation has spent upwards of $40bn in Sub-Saharan Africa, roughly three times the entire total of American philanthropy in the region in the 20th century. Most of that money has gone to global health, aiming to tackle AIDS, TB, malaria, polio and other diseases, and the Foundation claims to have contributed to saving 82m lives (primarily in Africa and South Asia). They have certainly played an important role in the huge improvements in life expectancy seen in Africa since the 1990s.

The Gates Foundation’s biggest impact, though, may actually be its approach to how philanthropy is done. It approached the work with a rigour and focus on cost-effectiveness that had been missing from much of existing development work, and helped to catalyse new organisations that then scaled up with government funding.

For example, Gates seeded Gavi and the Global Fund as well as pioneering advance market commitments, getting a pneumonia vaccine to poor countries years earlier than the market would have.

It’s important to remember that philanthropy is dwarfed by government overseas development assistance, and that all foreign aid is in turn dwarfed by the size of African government budgets and domestic economies.

In 2020, foreign philanthropy in Sub-Saharan Africa was ~$5bn, government overseas development assistance was ~$68bn, and spending by Sub-Saharan African governments was ~$430bn.

The best philanthropy takes advantage of its greater flexibility relative to institutional funding to ensure it has a catalytic effect.

These days, some might object that Gates and others have become too bureaucratic and institutional. Or, that they should’ve focused more on economic growth (which has at times been strong since the 90s, but still not fast enough) to durably lift people out of poverty.

Whatever his failings though, there’s a plausible case that Bill Gates has done more good than any private citizen alive today, and possibly any person.

Wave 3: The new wave of AI money.

That brings us to the third wave, a potential $5bn a year of new philanthropic funding that could flow into Africa.

It’s hard to guess exactly what approach this new wave of philanthropists might take, but I’d like to offer four stylised claims about how they are likely to approach global development:

1. They are likely to think AI is a transformative technology and to expect a very fast timeline for AI take-off.

2. They are likely to recognise the power of the private sector to create wealth

3. They are (mostly) unlikely to have deep experience/knowledge of low-income countries

4. Those who are familiar with Effective Altruism are likely to understand the huge range in cost-effectiveness between different global health interventions and the importance of thinking rigorously about impact.

If you’re an equity-holder in a frontier AI lab reading this, then I hope you are in equal parts inspired by Bill Gates’ example and motivated to be even more effective. In the next article I’ll make my modest contribution to the discussion on how you ought to direct your money to achieve this.

What can you do (if you’re not about to become a billionaire)?

This new wave of funding is a huge opportunity for anyone wishing to have a major impact in global development.

Of course, any funding is important, but the advent of a new wave of funding is a unique opportunity to innovate and build new organisations in global development.

With the collapse in government aid budgets in the US, UK and Europe, there is plenty of capacity to absorb funding. However, as the above chart shows, while much of that aid money was spent on highly-effective programmes, much of it was also spent on very ineffective programmes.

There might be opportunities to relaunch effective organisations like DIV Fund, which has recently risen from the ashes of USAID.

But this is also the time for talented people in Africa, in the diaspora and others to build a new highly-effective organisation to mobilise this funding.

In order for this money to be put to good use, someone needs to help it actually flow and not stay locked up in donor-advised funds in the US. These would-be philanthropists will be enormously busy and finding high-quality global development organisations to back is likely to slip down their priority list.

So, if you have the privilege of access to Silicon Valley elites, and can bridge the gap to effective global development work, then consider launching a fund, advisory, or some other vehicle to help direct this money. Renaissance Philanthropy is a great example of an organisation that is building new funds, and (hopefully) here at Africa Jobs Fund we’re an example of a great new fund.

At GiveWell’s current cost-effectiveness of $5,000 per life saved, $5bn a year over 20 years ($100bn) could save around 20 million lives.

If you’re reading this in Africa, in Silicon Valley, or elsewhere, make it your mission to ensure that we do even better than that.

In part two, I’ll be digging into where we think this new funding out to go. Make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it!

She’s a recent high-school graduate in Malawi. Because she’s hardworking and entrepreneurial, she is set to earn $1,500 a year once her career gets going (double Malawi’s GDP per capita of $721)

However, if she could learn German to B2 level and enrol in a nursing apprenticeship course in Germany, in a few years she would be earning $53,500 per year, a 35x increase. The same person, with the same natural talents, but just relocated to a different place.

The economist Michael Clemens refers to this as “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” The income gains from moving a worker from a low-income country to a high-income country dwarf almost any other change you could make to their life.

Subscribe now

The numbers

Here is what Thandiwe’s move looks like in practice:

Not only can Thandiwe increase her own income by 35x, by sending a modest 10% of her income back to her family, she can double the income of 7 of her family members.

Who else benefits

Thandiwe and her family benefit enormously. But they’re not the only stakeholders here. If Thandiwe leaves Malawi for Germany, how does it affect Malawi, Germany, and her new employer?

The origin country (Malawi)

Remittances are the obvious part of the equation here. If Thandiwe moves then Malawi will receive a steady stream of foreign currency transfers and Thandiwe’s family are far more likely to send their children to school, build a business and spend in the economy.

The benefits to the origin country go far beyond income transfers.

The Indian tech sector is a great example. In the 1990s as America’s tech sector began to take off, many talented Indians moved to the US to work in IT. By 2014, 86% of H1B visas for Computer Science roles were going to Indians.

This created a large pool of high-level tech professionals in the US with strong connections to India. And it also created incentives for young Indians to invest in learning CS and tech skills because the prospect of moving to the US to 10x their income was so enticing, even if most of them would not end up moving.

At a smaller scale, the African tech scene has followed the same pattern. The vast majority of successful startup founders in Africa studied or worked outside the continent before coming back to build.

So, in the long-run Malawi can end up with more foreign-exchange, more linkages to high-income markets and more talent.

The destination country

Rich countries are aging. In 1980, the average OECD country had 5.3 workers per elderly person in their population, by 2023 that had fallen to 3.2 and by 2060 it is set to reach 1.9. This leads to a shortage of workers across industries and particularly in sectors like care and nursing.

Labour migration is the obvious solution to manage this. If destination countries can bring in appropriately skilled working age people to fill labour shortages then this boosts economic growth, keeps costs down for the consumer in those sectors and these migrant workers tend to be net fiscal contributors over the course of their lifetimes.

This is by no means true for all forms of migration all the time. Populations who do not have the legal right to work on arrival (such as refugees in many countries) are inevitably a fiscal drain in the short-term. Additionally, migrant groups who fail to properly integrate can cause broader (and sometimes very serious) societal problems that might undermine the benefits of their labour market contributions.

However, if young foreign workers move directly into job placements in sectors with shortages, have the appropriate work training, learn the language, and sufficiently integrate, then the benefits to the destination country are clear.

The hiring company

Finally, the hiring company, in this case a German hospital. In 2023, the Federal Employment Agency reported only 44 jobseekers for every 100 registered nursing vacancies. In fact, the shortage of nurses is so pressing that hospitals are routinely willing to pay recruitment fees of $15,000+ for qualified German-speaking nurses. International recruitment fills a gap that domestic hiring cannot and helps to keep healthcare affordable for Germany’s ageing population.

Common objections

It seems that at least in some cases migration can produce the ‘quadruple-win’ beloved by migration policy reports, benefitting workers, employers, source countries and destination countries. However, there are still several common objections to assess.

“Brain drain”

Migration can benefit the domestic supply of skilled workers, as the Indian and African tech examples show.

Many of those workers who go overseas develop new skills and accumulate capital before moving back home again. In fact, around 40% of African migrants leave their destination country within five years, many of whom choose to return to their country of origin.

Additionally, increasing the economic return to developing skills will increase the incentive for workers to invest in those skills. The possibility of working in tech in the United States caused many Indians to go to engineering colleges and learn tech skills, most of whom then stayed in India and contributed to the domestic economy.

A study from the Philippines shows that after a policy change in 2004 opened up more opportunities for nurses to migrate to the United States, the resulting increase in Filipinos qualifying as nurses was 9x larger than the number of nurses that actually ended up moving to the US.

Finally, Africa does not suffer from a shortage of workers. Every year, 12 million young Africans enter the workforce and only 3 million new formal jobs are created.

Looking specifically at nurses, a study across 18 low-income countries (14 of which were in Africa) showed that 39.7% of trained nurses and midwives were unemployed. Many African countries already have more trained nurses than they can employ.

Thandiwe going to Germany does not create a shortage of nurses in Malawi but it does increase Malawian national income through remittances and gives the government more resources to hire the nurses it needs.

“Labour migration is exploitative”

The benefits of life in Europe for someone in Malawi are clear. Enormous income increases and access to infrastructure, social services, and a quality of life that would not otherwise have been possible. One concrete source of evidence for this comes from Malengo, a non-profit that has enabled hundreds of Ugandans from low-income backgrounds to move to Germany for education and work. They are running a randomised control trial on their ‘scholars’ and find that they report significantly improved wellbeing, as do their families, after they move to Germany.

Migration to the Gulf receives far more criticism and deservedly so. The Kafala system ties workers to specific employers, many migrants are misled regarding their contract terms and some workers (particularly women in domestic work) suffer serious abuse.

Despite that, the experience for most workers going to the Gulf in formal pathways is rather more positive than the headlines would lead you to believe.

A survey of migrant workers in Qatar found that 80% said their quality of life was “somewhat better” or “much better” than at home, while only 11% said it was worse. 92% were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” when asked whether their rights were being respected.

Another study asked 2,000 migrants returning to Kerala after working in the Gulf what their immediate life plans were. Half said that they wanted to re-migrate immediately, while the other half planned to start a business or find a job locally.

Finally, Nepalese government data shows that migrants in the Gulf experienced a death rate of 6.5 per 10,000, against 23 per 10,000 for comparable demographics in Nepal. This is not to say that working in the Gulf is necessarily safer than being at home in Nepal though, because the study was unable to control for the selection effect that only healthy people would choose to migrate. But once again, the data does not support the narrative of universal suffering and abuse.

Many migrants to the Gulf are exploited and mistreated, whether by dishonest brokers up-front or abusive employers once they arrive, but this is not a universal experience. The appropriate response is to try and build a better system rather than to condemn Gulf migration in its entirety and therefore either yield the space to bad actors or to try and deny low-income Africans a life-changing economic opportunity.

“Why not focus on remote work opportunities?”

Countries like India built significant export sectors from service outsourcing. But that model is now under serious threat from LLMs.

The type of work that can be neatly packaged and sent across the world to someone is exactly the work that AI is best suited to replace. The major publicly listed outsourcing firms (call centres, data entry, basic software development, document processing) have seen stock prices drop 62.5% since ChatGPT launched.

Higher-complexity outsourcing may survive longer and new sectors may appear as AI reshaped the economy. Overall though, it seems likely that large-scale, low-complexity remote work will be one of the first areas to be automated by AI.

Meanwhile, professions that require human interaction and complex motor skills (such as nurses or tradespeople) are the least at risk from AI and also the sectors with the biggest existing shortages in high-income countries.

“You’re giving up on jobs in Africa”

If you care about actually making things happen rather than ideological purity, you have to accept trade-offs. With 12 million people entering the workforce each year and 3 million formal jobs being created each year, even radical improvements in job creation will not meet the needs of Africa’s next generation. What’s more labour mobility stimulates the economy of the origin country through remittances, economic linkages and skill-accumulation, thereby supporting job creation in Africa.

As for the Africa Jobs Fund specifically, our other core focus is actually on creating high-productivity jobs in Africa through export manufacturing.

“Rich countries are shutting their borders”

While a few countries are reducing migration, that is not the trend. As the chart below shows, permanent migration has been increasing across the OECD. Don’t make the mistake of over-generalising based on current American politics.

In general, the evidence suggests that voters broadly support migration when it is orderly and tied to public benefit. Research by Alexander Kustov suggests that voters are actually broadly supportive of orderly labour migration that is tied to the public benefit. The political backlash is primarily generated by irregular migration and the perception that governments are not prioritising the interests of citizens. For example, the chart below shows that immigration concern in Europe is much more closely linked to arrivals of asylum seekers than to regular immigration flows.

Italy’s recent immigration policy is a perfect example of this political calculus. Meloni’s nationalist government has cracked down on illegal migration and reduced pathways to citizenship, but at the same time they have liberalised parts of the labour migration system and made it easier for overseas workers to come to Italy.

It seems likely that many OECD countries will continue to see anti-immigration backlash and policies will swing back-and-forth based on political turnovers. In the end though, the long-term need for workers is clear and citizens are broadly supportive of productive orderly migration.

Getting there

So what would it actually take to get Thandiwe to Germany?

For Thandiwe to make that move, she needs to overcome some hurdles:

• Learn German to intermediate (B2) level. Germany requires migrants to speak intermediate German but Thandiwe has limited access to German classes in Malawi and the cost to get to B2 would likely be more than her entire annual income.

• Find a placement in Germany. Hospitals have significant nursing shortages, but how does Thandiwe get a placement for herself when she has no connections and no one to vouch for her.

• Figure out the visa and logistics. Thandiwe has never travelled overseas before and she needs to get a passport and visa, book flights, and then set-up a whole new life in Germany.

Some version of this set of problems is present across most labour mobility corridors. Most migrants have to overcome challenges with financing, language learning, job placement, visas and logistics.

Different corridors have solved these challenges to varying degrees. For example a worker in Nairobi has the privilege of choosing from a few different German language schools, but he still lacks access to financing to cover the costs.

The opportunity

How can we fix these barriers and build a system that works for everyone?

Labour migration from Africa runs almost entirely through private sector intermediaries: recruitment agencies, language schools, training providers, financing companies.

Government regulations shape the structure of the industry, but the many well-meaning public-sector efforts to actually operationalise the work of labour migration agencies tend to fall flat. They are not disciplined by the need to meet the requirements of employers in the same way and grant funded projects do not have the same scale potential as for-profit companies.

The private sector is the primary actor in labour migration and there are many profitable, scalable, high-impact businesses to be built.

Some are already doing it:

• Malengo has built an innovative financing model for East Africans from low-income and refugee backgrounds to move to Germany. They cover the full up-front costs of the worker, language training, visa, flights, etc., and then the worker pays them back later once he is earning above a certain threshold, a model called an income share agreement.

• Velocity is pioneering online German language training in Africa to reduce the costs and time commitment for would-be learners.

• Aedilo is pioneering ethical recruitment in the Gulf by refusing to collect or pay any unofficial fees.

But there are many more corridors to be opened up and plenty of infrastructure still to be built. Who’s going to help Malawians access jobs in Germany, or Ethiopians to work in hospitality in Greece? Who’s going to build the financing instruments that allow the lowest-income workers to overcome the initial costs and access these life-changing opportunities? Who’s going to provide the low-cost training infrastructure to help African workers learn German or Italian or Serbian?

This is not a small challenge, it is fundamental to the future of the global economy and could be transformational for millions of people. Each year 6.5m people migrate permanently to an OECD country and another 4.5m move on a temporary basis (roughly evenly split between temporary workers and international students).

Meanwhile, data for migrants flows to the Gulf is harder to come by; but based on a total stock of 35m foreign workers and assuming an average tenure of 8 years, then rough annual immigration is 4m workers. Currently, relatively few of these workers are from Sub-Saharan Africa (they made up only 5.3% of foreign workers in the last Saudi census).

In general, relatively few migrants come from the lowest-income backgrounds (and countries) that would benefit the most, particularly in Africa, because they face increased frictions and they don’t have the necessary resources to overcome the costs of migrating.

We think exceptional entrepreneurs are needed to take on this huge challenge, and build the labour migration companies that can benefit both the world’s poorest people and the countries they are moving to.

At Africa Jobs Fund we are building this next generation of labour mobility companies. We identify the highest-impact opportunities, find talented entrepreneurs to build them, provide them with seed capital, and then work hand-in-hand with them to get the company off the ground. It may not be a ‘sexy’ sector to focus on, but we believe this is one of the most effective ways to increase quality of life for low-income people in Africa at scale (check-out the appendix for a more detailed assessment of the cost-effectiveness).

If you’re excited about building the future of labour mobility then you can check out our website or apply to build with us.

Subscribe now

Further Reading

And if you want to read more about international labour mobility then we recommend these articles as a starting point:

Literature on international labour mobility:

VoxDev Literature Review - International Migration (Dean Yang)

“International migration is one of the most powerful tools available for poverty reduction and economic development.”

Emigration as Growth Strategy (Charles Kenny - CGD)

“The evidence suggests that emigration is reliably associated with poverty reduction and investments in human capital [in the country of origin]”

The Least You Can Do for Global Poverty Is Better than the Best You Can Do (Lant Pritchett)

“The annual gain from a gold standard poverty program is roughly 1/40th the wage differential of low skill workers from these countries working in their country versus the USA”

Malengo:

What happens when you send Ugandan Students to German (Lauren Gilbert)

“Without Malengo, he likely wouldn’t have been able to attend university at all, let alone study in Europe. He told me that “you can’t picture someone like me being [able to study] in Germany.” He is incredibly cognizant of how lucky he is - he told me that “there might be people better than me but they don’t have this chance. I’m here representing the whole community of people who have dreams.”"

Malengo Evidence Update 2025 - Preliminary RCT Results (Johannes Haushofer and Richard Nerland)

The program is 28 times more effective than cash transfers in a baseline scenario, and 3,732 times in an optimistic scenario.

Cost-Effectiveness

If you want to better understand the cost-effectiveness of building new labour mobility companies then check-out this (highly-simplified) analysis that calculates the philanthropic subsidy required per year of doubled consumption created.

Our analyses suggest that Africa Jobs Fund can achieve multiples of the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top recommended charities.

View the Spreadsheet here. Feel free to make a copy and play around with the numbers.

We are launching the Africa Jobs Fund to dramatically boost incomes for low-income Africans through access to high-productivity jobs. We will catalyse world-class entrepreneurs to build high-impact, scalable companies in two sectors: export manufacturing and international labour mobility.

We intend to mobilise $100 million of philanthropic capital towards international labour mobility and export manufacturing. Based on our cost-effectiveness analysis, this funding should enable us to double the lifetime incomes of at least 250,000 low-income people in Africa. To start, we are raising $15m of philanthropic funding to build at least 20 high-impact companies. We also hope to shift global development work towards focusing on what really matters in the long run: increasing incomes through high-productivity jobs.

The fund is housed within Renaissance Philanthropy; a nonprofit organization building a brighter future for all through the time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic funds. We are already working on venture-building our first set of companies. This piece sets out why creating jobs for Africa’s next generation is of paramount importance, why building companies in export manufacturing and international labour mobility is the solution, and how you can help.

Why?

Poverty in Africa is a huge challenge

By 2040, around 24% of the world’s population will live in Africa.

By 2040, around 80% of people living in extreme poverty globally will be in Africa (~600m people).

Most of these people will lack access to basic sanitation, proper healthcare, and quality education.

Higher incomes solve (almost) everything

Across countries, income per person accounts for almost all of the variation in the metrics that matter for human welfare: child mortality, life expectancy, education, self-reported happiness, etc.

For example, no country with income per person below $7,000 has been able to reduce the share of newborn children dying before the age of 5 below 1%.

On the flipside, no country has ever become rich without seeing dramatic improvements in quality of life for their population.1

Raising incomes is the best and most durable way to dramatically improve quality of life for the world’s poor.

The two pillars

The only durable path to high incomes is through high-productivity jobs. We’ve surveyed the options and two pathways stand out by a wide margin in creating these jobs: international labour mobility and export manufacturing. Both are well-evidenced and hugely under-funded relative to their potential impact.

International labour mobility

GDP per capita in Malawi is roughly $550 and in Germany it’s over $55,000, a 100x gap.

Germany, like most OECD countries, has a rapidly ageing population and acute shortages in many sectors, such as elderly care, nursing, manufacturing, logistics and more. These shortages are only getting worse.

Let’s assume we take a talented Malawian worker earning $2000 a year (4x the national average) and help them to move to Germany:

Not only does their personal income increase by 25x, but if they send 10% of their income home in remittances ($5,500), they can double the incomes of ten of their family members.

And the benefits don’t stop there:

• That $5500 in remittances stimulates demand in the Malawian economy and enables business growth and new economic activity

• Many migrants return home later in life, bringing capital and skills, to build back home

• Diaspora populations create new economic linkages and export opportunities from their origin country

• Migration opportunities create incentives for workers to invest in acquiring new skills, which often end up being used at home (e.g. 9x more people trained as nurses in the Philippines in response to the chance of moving to the US than actually ended up moving.)

One great example of the benefits of these spillover effects is India’s now booming tech sector, which was built in large part by returnees from Silicon Valley using their newfound connections & skill to build outsourcing businesses, staffed by local workers many of whom had invested in tech skills in the hope of accessing jobs in America.

International labour mobility is a huge opportunity and growing. The OECD absorbs around 6.5 million permanent and 4.5 million temporary migrants each year, with a further 4 million temporary workers going to the Gulf.

But the system is broken. Workers from the lowest-income countries often can’t access these opportunities due to a lack of proper infrastructure; there are too few ethical recruitment agencies, language schools, financing partners, etc., and would-be migrants instead face confusing bureaucracy, prohibitive up-front fees, and temptations to consider illegal pathways. Meanwhile, destination country employers struggle to find ethical recruiters who can consistently provide them with workers that have the right training, qualifications and language skills.

There is a huge market failure here, but it can be fixed by building a new generation of companies that make international labour mobility work for everyone. This doesn’t just benefit the migrants themselves, but also their families, their origin countries, their new employers and their destination countries.

We’ll be sharing a deeper dive on labour mobility next week, so make sure to subscribe to this Substack. In the meantime, you can read more on international labour mobility here, here, and here.

Export manufacturing

Almost every country that has become rich did so by industrialising: Britain, Germany, the United States, Japan, China, Poland, Turkey, Mauritius, etc.

More specifically, this growth was driven by manufacturing labour-intensive value-added goods for export.

There are important reasons why export manufacturing is uniquely well-suited to driving development:

• Productivity: International competition forces export businesses to converge to global productivity standards. Workers in export manufacturing exhibit productivity levels around 5x higher than in subsistence agriculture.

• Scale: The global market is vast, so growth isn’t bottlenecked by limited local demand and there is plenty of space to move up the productivity ladder into higher value-add sectors.

• Additive earnings: Overseas earnings are purely additive to the economy. Exporters aren’t taking market share from local firms, so there is a much larger boost to local incomes with significant multiplier effects, less political resistance, and inbound flows of valuable foreign currency.

• Labour absorption: Unlike tradeable services, manufacturing employs large numbers of people who have a relatively low level of education and boosts their incomes significantly.

Over the past decades, Africa has undergone ‘premature deindustrialisation’ and the manufacturing share of the economy has dropped to 10%, while at the same time it has risen to 25% in China.

However, as China and other manufacturing hubs continue to get richer, their wages are rising and new opportunities are opening up to compete in low-cost manufacturing. Combine this with Africa’s favourable tariff access to the US, EU, GCC and China and the continent is well-placed for a manufacturing boom.

One common objection is that automation makes this impossible. However, there are still plenty of areas of manufacturing, like garments, that require complex motor skills and where human workers are unlikely to be replaced anytime soon. As Joe Studwell argues in How Asia Works, the economics of labour-intensive assembly still favour workers in low-wage economies over the machines that would otherwise replace them.

There are already businesses doing this in Africa. For example, Tooku Garments in Tanzania employs close to 10,000 workers making jeans for Levi’s and other global brands. Why can’t there be thousands more of these businesses?

The challenge is that first-mover businesses in a new export sector face significant setup and learning costs that they must overcome. Things like training workers, building supply chains, and landing anchor customers, which then de-risk the model for copy-cat businesses to follow. But, someone has to go first and that requires a talented entrepreneur, backed by risk-tolerant, catalytic capital - which is where the Africa Jobs Fund comes in.

Our model

We think there should be more international labour mobility and export manufacturing in Africa. So we’re going to build the companies that actually do it.

We take two approaches to making that happen:

• Venture building. We identify specific gaps for pioneer firms, scope the opportunity, recruit an exceptional founder, and then provide seed capital, operational support and network.2

• Catalytic capital. We make investments into existing businesses that are expanding into new verticals or geographies that are particularly high-impact and in need of concessional funding that commercial markets cannot provide.

We are raising grant money but primarily deploying it as investments. We are backing early-stage, high-risk, pioneer ventures. These companies would not necessarily be compelling commercial investments at the stage when we invest, but if they succeed they can deliver a huge direct impact alongside proving the business model for copy-cat companies that serve to multiply the total impact.

All of our spending is benchmarked against a cost-effectiveness bar of less than $10 philanthropic subsidy per year of doubled consumption/income. That means $100 million of funding will be enough to double the lifetime incomes of 250,000 low-income people in Africa.

Or, if you’re looking at it from the perspective of income gains, our analysis suggests that we can increase incomes by at least $500 for every $1 in philanthropic subsidy.

We also want to convince the startup ecosystem, the global development community, and all those who care about creating impact in Africa to focus more attention and resources on these two sectors. Partly by leading by example and showing what can be built, and partly by publicly making our case.

Why not the existing models?

Why not build VC startups?

African tech has been a fantastic growth story over the past few years. Flutterwave, Wasoko, Paystack, and many others. We are products of that ecosystem and are excited to see it continue to grow.

But venture-scale returns are only possible in a small subset of business-models, and these are often not the same models that create the biggest positive impact on the economy.

Hyper-scaling a business necessarily means finding a way to avoid tackling some of the thornier operational problems in the economy as this would slow down growth too much. The sectors most suited to the venture approach, such as fintech, SaaS, and micro-lending tend to involve small teams (fewer jobs) and focus on tech-enabled efficiency gains at the margin, rather than directly increasing production capacity in the economy.

We think many talented entrepreneurs could have an even bigger impact by focusing on ‘un-sexy’ sectors like export manufacturing and international labour mobility. These companies may not deliver venture returns but they are also much more likely to succeed and relative to the size of the company, they have much larger positive spillovers for workers and for the broader economy. E.g. per worker placed, a labour migration firm might only make a profit of $2,000, but they might enable the worker to earn an extra $2,000,000 over the course of their lifetime.

Finally, sectors like exports and labour-mobility serve paying customers overseas and thereby bring foreign earnings into African economies. These revenues are purely additive to the economy, thereby growing the size of the pie, unlike domestic companies which are generally competing against other local companies for the same (relatively small) market.

Why not build ‘highly-effective’ non-profit programmes?

GiveWell is the standard-setter for cost-effectiveness in global development philanthropy. They evaluate global-health interventions on cost per life saved or cost per DALY averted, and their top charities (AMF, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller, New Incentives) are among the most effective ways anyone has found to improve human welfare per dollar. They have pioneered massive improvements in global development. We have both contributed to their recommended charities personally.

In fact, we use GiveWell’s benchmarks as the gold standard to beat, and we’re confident that we can. Their top charities achieve the equivalent of one year of doubled consumption for a low-income person at a cost of $40 of philanthropic funding and our analysis leads us to believe we can achieve this same outcome for less than $10.3

GiveWell, J-PAL and other evidence driven development organisations do great work precisely because they are rigorous. They can be certain about the cost-effectiveness because they tightly measure the effects of interventions with randomised control trials. But, that discipline means they underinvest in interventions where the expected value is high but the impact is unmeasurable or uncertain for some reason. For example, the structural transformation of whole economies, or even just programmes with large and widely distributed spillover effects, cannot usually be measured by field experiments and therefore end up being overlooked.

Additionally, non-profits often ignore the power of the private sector. Countries have only ever become rich through the creation of large private businesses. Catalysing new companies can be far more cost-effective than backing non-profits from a grant perspective because once they get going then companies can pay for themselves!

GiveWell and global health interventions are excellent, and we hope people keep funding them! We just think that private sector businesses in export manufacturing and international labour mobility can be even more cost-effective, even if it is a little harder to measure with complete certainty.

Who we are

Our team (and our advisors) have deep experience building businesses in Africa and are well-placed to make this vision a reality:

Daniel Yu, Founding Partner. Founder of Wasoko, Africa’s largest B2B e-commerce company, serving 150,000+ businesses, having raised $145 million, with 2,500 staff at peak. Board Chair of Malengo, a leading migration non-profit enabling low-income East-Africans to study/work in Germany. Forbes 30 under 30. Speaks 8 languages.

Ben Hyman, Operating Partner. Started Talent Safari, a recruitment company for startups in Africa. Previously product and growth at Leta.ai, a Google-backed African logistics startup. Advisor to Malengo and Health Progress Hub.

Our advisors include Samantha Power (former Head of USAID and US Ambassador to the UN) and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (Co-Founder of two African unicorn startups, Andela and Flutterwave).

What happens next

We are building our first companies in international labour mobility right now and looking for exceptional founders, apply to build with through our website.

We are are working on our initial fundraise of $15m in philanthropic capital with an ultimate ambition to direct $100m towards these two sectors over the coming years. If you’re a funder, get in touch.

We expect to hire a couple of team members this year. If you’re exceptionally talented, high-agency, and excited about our mission then we would love to hear from you.

And if you’re just interested in following along then please subscribe to this Substack and reshare this launch piece! We’ll be posting long-form pieces regularly, including guest essays from leading experts.

Share

The two best ways to raise African incomes at scale are under-funded by an order of magnitude. We intend to fix that, and to dramatically increase the incomes of millions of people. Join us on our mission!

Check-out our Website