Director of Venture Building — Labour Mobility

The Africa Jobs Fund catalyses high-impact companies that can dramatically boost incomes for people in Africa. We focus on two areas with the biggest potential to move the needle: export manufacturing and international labour mobility. We intend to mobilise $100m towards these spaces over the coming years, with which we aim to create $50bn in income gains for African workers and double the lifetime incomes of over 250,000 low-income people. You can read our full thesis and impact model on our website.

We venture-build new companies (identifying high-impact opportunities and sourcing talented founders to build them), and we make catalytic investments in existing companies. Not only do we intend to have a huge direct impact on hundreds of thousands of lives, but we also hope to shift the development (and startup) conversations in Africa towards approaches that effectively and durably increase incomes at scale.

We’re a very small team, and we’re moving fast. You’ll work directly with the co-founders with enormous autonomy from day one. We are looking for someone who is exceptionally talented, impact-motivated, high-agency and hardworking.

This is a senior role on our international labour mobility pillar: building the companies that move African workers into life-changing jobs abroad. 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. (Read our full case for international labour mobility.) Your job is to make more of that happen.

You’ll build companies yourself, and you’ll play a key role in shaping our strategy for the sector: which corridors and destination markets we prioritise, where the real bottlenecks are, and how we sequence our capital against them. You’ll work closely with the co-founders on those questions. You’ll also play a key role in building out the team, and in managing our venture-builders working on labour mobility.

To be clear, this is not an investment job. You’ll need to be hugely proactive in helping to build companies, constantly exploring new projects and making new investments, not sitting back and evaluating pitches.

You’ll spend your time on:

• Building companies. Run your own projects end to end: spotting the opportunity, finding and convincing the founder, building the company alongside them, structuring and making the investment, and supporting them hands-on as they scale. For example, flying out to Malindi to vet TVETs and partners for sourcing Italian-speaking hospitality workers.
• Corridor and market scoping. Figure out which corridors, sectors, and geographies we should focus on. Speak to recruiters, employers, and operators on the ground to assess where the real opportunities and bottlenecks are, whether that’s cruise ship recruitment in Kenya or hospitality placements into Italy. Feed that into how we think about the sector.
• Team building and management. Help us grow the labour mobility team, and manage the venture-builders working in it. Review their CEAs and deal structures, unblock them, and help keep the bar high on quality and pace.
• Investment assessment and structuring. Assess investments, develop and pressure-test cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs), and structure deals. You might be deciding on a revenue-based financing model vs equity, or modelling the future income gains that a particular mobility company can create.
• External representation. Be a credible face for AJF’s labour mobility work with governments, employers, recruiters, funders and partner organisations. Build the relationships that open corridors, and contribute to our public writing where it helps shift the conversation.

The pace is quick and the bureaucracy is minimal. A strong venture-builder should be funding 10+ new companies and projects every year, and you’ll run projects from initial conversation to investment yourself, with just a (quick) final approval from management. The ceiling on this role is very high for the right person.

We will not hire anyone who doesn’t meet all of the following:

• You’ve built companies. Either as a founder or as a senior operator. You’ve taken something from nothing, or run a real part of a business, and you’ve carried the responsibility that comes with it. This is the single most important thing we’re looking for.
• AI-native. You regularly use the best AI tools to automate your work and rely on them constantly to optimise your workflows.
• Exceptionally talented and intelligent. You can think about hard problems deeply, absorb information quickly and generate insightful analyses.
• Problem solver. You’re excited about taking on new challenges every day. You’ll constantly be tackling new and different tasks and you should find that energising rather than uncomfortable.
• Able to build and lead a team. You’ve managed high-performing people before and you’ve done it in a small organisation, not behind layers of process. You give direct feedback and you raise the bar on the people around you.
• Hardworking. This is not a 9-5. We’re a small team with a huge mission and we work hard.
• Mission-driven. You’re driven by a real desire to have a positive impact in an evidence-driven way.
• Results & evidence-focused. You don’t just care about working in impact, you care about working on the projects that are most likely to yield results. You understand why labour mobility is one of the most promising routes to increase the quality of life for low-income people.

We’re looking for ex-founders or senior operators. What matters is that you have built or run something real, and that you know how to move fast and execute.

• You’ve founded a company, or operated at a senior level in one. You’ve carried real responsibility for outcomes: a P&L, a business line, a company. Ideally you’ve been through the 0 → 1 stage yourself, so you know what founders are actually dealing with when you sit across from them.
• Experience managing people, in an environment where you were building as well as leading.
• Experience in labour mobility, or similar sectors, is highly valuable. This could be international recruitment, staffing, migration programmes, or adjacent spaces like lending and consumer finance.
• Strong experience working in Africa.
• 8–20 years of experience. We’re flexible on seniority level; we care more about finding exceptional people.

Bonus experience. These are not required, but would be great to have:

• Language skills. French would be most valuable, but German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish and all other destination-market languages would be hugely valuable.
• Experience in investment, structuring deals, or VC.
• Academic grounding in development economics and a working understanding of cost-effectiveness analysis.