The Africa Jobs Fund, a $100mn philanthropic venture vehicle launched by Wasoko founder Daniel Yu, has made its first investment in Velocity, a company that trains African nurses in German and places them in German hospitals.
The investment will fund Velocity’s expansion from Kenya into Malawi and Zambia, two markets the fund describes as “traditionally underserved”. The size of the investment was not disclosed.
Velocity was founded by Lalit Kumar, Siddharth Gusain and Betty Chelangat, and launched in Kenya in June 2025. Kumar was previously founding Africa director at Evidence Action and Africa managing director at the Global Innovation Fund. Gusain brings retail, banking and consulting experience from India, while Chelangat has worked across startups in the US, UK and Kenya.
The company trains qualified nurses to German B2 level — the standard required by German employers and regulators — through online instruction delivered by Kenyan nurses already working in Germany. It has developed its own language learning app tailored to clinical contexts rather than textbook German. Employers cover the cost of training through placement fees, with learners paying only a nominal commitment fee that is refunded upon placement.
Velocity already has more than 300 active learners and a waitlist of over 2,500. To date, it said, every candidate who has interviewed with employers has been successfully placed.
The corridor logic
The investment targets a clear supply-demand mismatch. Germany is short of tens of thousands of nurses and has spent a decade easing pathways for qualified foreign workers, including accelerated procedures for non-EU qualifications. More than 350,000 nurses with foreign citizenship now work in Germany — roughly one in five of all nursing staff.
Meanwhile, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia all have significant numbers of unemployed or underemployed nurses. The Nursing Council of Kenya reports that more than 40 per cent of registered nurses are unemployed or underemployed, with about 10,000 graduating each year but only 3,000 finding work.
The opportunity in Malawi and Zambia is particularly stark. Germany currently issues fewer than 10 work permits annually to Malawians and about 20 to Zambians. If Velocity places 25 Malawian nurses next year, it could more than triple total labour mobility between the two countries.
Income impact
For nurses who make the move, the financial uplift is dramatic. A nurse in Malawi with a four-year degree and several years of experience earns around MWK 475,000 per month — about €117 at current parallel market exchange rates. In a German hospital, she starts at €2,500 per month as a nursing aide and rises to roughly €3,500 monthly (€42,000 annually) after passing the German registration exam, typically within six to nine months.
After taxes and remittances, the nurse’s disposable income increases by roughly 25 times. Velocity’s survey of placed Kenyan nurses found they intend to send €500-€750 home monthly — enough to more than double the income of seven family members. Nurses cited sibling school tuition, family healthcare and land purchases as primary uses for remittances.
Philanthropic venture model
The Africa Jobs Fund, housed within Renaissance Philanthropy, was launched in May 2026 with an ambition to mobilise $100mn over five years. It targets two sectors: international labour mobility and export manufacturing, which the fund argues are the most reliable routes out of poverty.
The fund operates a hybrid model of venture building — identifying market gaps and recruiting founders — and catalytic capital, making concessional investments into existing businesses expanding into high-impact areas. It benchmarks spending against a cost-effectiveness threshold of less than $10 in philanthropic subsidy for each year of doubled consumption.
Yu, who stepped back from day-to-day leadership of Wasoko following its merger with MaxAB, serves as a founding partner alongside Ben Hyman. Senior advisors include Samantha Power, former head of USAID and former US ambassador to the UN, and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave.
The fund’s thesis is that venture-scale returns are not always aligned with maximum developmental impact. A labour mobility firm might earn just $2,000 per worker placed while enabling that worker to earn an extra $2mn over a lifetime.
“Persistent poverty is at its core a jobs problem,” Yu said at the fund’s launch. “Africa has hundreds of millions of working-age people reliant on subsistence agriculture or informal work that pays a few dollars a day. Those same people, in the right job at home or abroad, could earn significant multiples of their income”.
The fund estimates that if it meets its $100mn target, it can generate $50bn in income gains for low-income Africans. The Velocity investment offers an early test of whether that ambition can translate into results.