What is venture-building?

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?

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.

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 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!