Daniel Yu, the founder of Wasoko, has launched a $100 million philanthropic fund to back companies that create high-productivity jobs for low-income workers across the continent, marking a sharp departure from his decade-long career in tech start-ups.
The Africa Jobs Fund, housed within Renaissance Philanthropy, will target two sectors that Yu and his team argue are uniquely placed to lift incomes at scale: export manufacturing and international labour mobility. The initiative aims to double the lifetime earnings of at least 250,000 people, deploying catalytic capital to build enterprises that commercial investors would typically consider too risky or low-return.
The launch, announced on Tuesday, comes just months after Yu stepped back from day-to-day leadership of Wasoko following its landmark merger with MaxAB. That deal created one of Africa’s largest B2B retail networks, but Yu’s departure and the combined entity’s subsequent pivot from logistics to financial services underscored the difficult economics that have forced many of the continent’s best-known founders to reassess their strategies.
“For the past several years, I’ve spent many nights reflecting on what to spend my life doing,” Yu wrote in a statement accompanying the fund’s launch. “When some segments of humanity had escaped the existential threats of hunger, disease, and material deprivation, why did we continue to tolerate those same conditions for hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings?”
The fund is initially raising $15 million in philanthropic grants to build at least 20 companies, with an ultimate ambition to direct $100 million towards the two sectors. It will operate a hybrid model: venture building, where it identifies market gaps and recruits founders, and catalytic capital, where it makes concessional investments into existing businesses expanding into high-impact areas.
Spending will be benchmarked against a cost-effectiveness threshold of less than $10 in philanthropic subsidy for each year of doubled consumption, a figure that undercuts the roughly $40 equivalent that GiveWell uses for its top global health charities.
Yu, 31, who speaks eight languages and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, will serve as a founding partner alongside Ben Hyman. The venture’s advisory board includes Samantha Power, former head of USAID and US ambassador to the UN, and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave.
The fund’s thesis rests on two pillars. The first, international labour mobility, aims to bridge the vast income gaps between low-income African countries and ageing OECD economies. The team points to the 100-fold difference in nominal GDP per capita between Malawi and Germany, arguing that helping a single Malawian worker migrate to a high-income country could increase their earnings 25-fold while remittances multiply the effect across extended families.
Yet ethical recruitment infrastructure is scarce, creating what the fund describes as a “huge market failure” that leaves both workers and destination-country employers underserved.
The second pillar, export manufacturing, draws on the historical record of East Asian industrialisation. Yu and Hyman note that almost every country that has become rich did so by manufacturing labour-intensive goods for global markets. Africa, however, has experienced “premature deindustrialisation”, with manufacturing’s share of output falling to around 10 per cent even as it climbed to roughly a quarter of China’s economy.
The fund sees an opportunity in rising Chinese wages and Africa’s preferential tariff access to the US, EU, Gulf and China. It cites the example of Tooku Garments, which employs close to 10,000 workers making jeans for Levi’s, as proof that scaled manufacturing is viable.
Both strategies explicitly target foreign earnings that are “purely additive” to African economies, avoiding competition with local firms. This, the fund argues, creates larger income multipliers and reduces political resistance compared with domestic-focused interventions.
The launch comes at a turbulent time for African tech. Yu’s transition at Wasoko followed similar handovers at Yoco, mPharma and Elmenus, suggesting a maturation of the ecosystem where professional managers replace founding visionaries.
Wasoko, which raised $145 million and served more than 150,000 businesses at its peak, merged with MaxAB in a deal that created a company spanning multiple countries. But the combined entity has since aggressively pivoted to fintech, securing a financial services licence from Central Bank of Egypt and scaling back traditional e-commerce operations in Morocco. Its financial services arm already generates more than $180 million in annual turnover.
Investor VNV Global, an early backer, marked down the value of its 2.1 per cent stake by 4 per cent to $10 million in early 2025, signalling caution around the low-margin economics of B2B distribution.
Yu’s move into philanthropy is not entirely abrupt. He has been board chair of Malengo, a non-profit that helps low-income East Africans study and work in Germany, and that experience appears to have informed the fund’s labour mobility focus.
Still, the shift from running a venture-funded unicorn to launching a development fund that explicitly rejects the VC model invites scrutiny.
“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,” the fund’s launch document states. “Hyper-scaling a business necessarily means finding a way to avoid tackling some of the thornier operational problems.”
The Africa Jobs Fund instead wants to back “un-sexy” companies that might generate modest profits relative to their capital but enormous spillover effects. A labour mobility firm, for example, might earn just $2,000 per worker placed while enabling that worker to earn an extra $2 million over a lifetime.
The approach is not without risk. Export manufacturing in Africa has long been hampered by unreliable infrastructure, skills gaps and bureaucratic hurdles. Labour mobility, meanwhile, is politically sensitive in destination countries where migration can become a flashpoint. The fund will need to convince donors that its venture-building model can succeed where numerous industrialisation and migration programmes have struggled.
Yu’s team acknowledges these challenges but argues that the biggest barrier is a shortage of risk-tolerant, entrepreneurial capital willing to absorb first-mover costs.
“Someone has to go first,” the fund’s statement says. “That requires a talented entrepreneur, backed by risk-tolerant, catalytic capital — which is where the Africa Jobs Fund comes in.”
The fund is already building its first companies in international labour mobility and is seeking founders and additional funders. It plans to publish detailed analyses of both sectors in the coming weeks.
If it meets its $100 million target, the team calculates it can generate $50 billion in income gains for low-income Africans — a claim that will be closely watched as the initiative moves from ambition to execution.