Venture Builder — 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 role is focused 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.

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:

• 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.
• Founder sourcing and conviction-building. Find potential founders and convince them of the impact of labour mobility and why they should build a company with us. This isn’t just sourcing; you’ll have to persuade exceptional people to take on this challenge with us, while also assessing them as potential investments.
• Investment assessment and structuring. Help assess investments, develop investment cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs), and structure deals. You might be helping to decide on a revenue-based financing model vs equity, or modelling the future income gains that a particular mobility company can create.
• Portfolio support. Support our portfolio companies post-investment, make connections into our network, and help them scale. We don’t run training programmes or share abstract insights; this will concretely be helping founders build their companies 0 → 1, e.g. flying out to Malindi to 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 you’ll run projects from initial conversations to investment yourself, with just a (quick) final approval from management. As you grow in the role, we will keep giving you more responsibility and autonomy. 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:

• 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.
• 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 open to candidates from a range of backgrounds. What matters is that you know how to move fast and execute.

• 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.
• Experience building (or working in) fast-growing early-stage companies.
• Strong experience working in Africa.
• 4–15 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, and other destination-market languages are all a bonus.
• Experience in investment, structuring deals, or VC.
• Academic grounding in development economics and a working understanding of cost-effectiveness analysis.