In Ruli, in Rwanda’s Northern Province, miners trek through dense forest each morning to haul 30-70kg bags of tungsten out of tunnels on their backs. They earn between 10 and 50 cents a bag. Their entire work history exists as tick-marks in a timekeeper’s paper booklet, and twice a week they walk five kilometres to have their wages counted out in cash in front of them. That booklet contains thousands of de facto CVs.
.png)
As much as informal work underpins African economies, very little of it lives in trusted, portable, shareable records. Workers build skills, earn an income and prove themselves over the years, but when one job ends, much of that history disappears with it. That has implications far beyond finding the next job. It shapes access to finance, insurance, social protection and the broader ability to participate in the digital economy.
Fixa is fixing this with verified employment data
When we first met Fixa in 2024, they had built a profitable labour contracting platform in Rwanda, supplying temporary workers into the construction sector. These large employers suddenly had a much better way to engage with workers, manage attendance and run payroll, while the workers themselves got more consistent employment, quicker access to their wages and a clearer record of the jobs they had actually done. It was a solid business solving a genuine problem in the sector.
But the more time we spent with the team, the more we realised staffing wasn’t the whole story. And in hindsight, the staffing business was really the wedge. Every worker onboarded, every shift completed and every payroll processed was creating something that barely exists across Africa’s informal economy: verified employment data.
Over the past 20 years, financial inclusion has been shaped by a few major infrastructure shifts. Digital identity made it easier to prove who you are. Mobile money changed how money moves. Better payment rails and alternative credit data made many new financial products possible. Employment identity will likely make it to that list.
By employment identity, we mean a trusted, portable record of where someone has worked, what they’ve earned and the skills they’ve demonstrated over time. We will soon be unpacking how this works across platforms in a learning study with a nifty starter kit for founders, so stay tuned!
This is particularly important for women in the informal economy, representing 92% of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Many women move between employers, combine several income streams, or step away from paid work because of caregiving responsibilities. Even after years of working, there is often no employment history that can travel with them into the next opportunity. Work stays transactional, rather than cumulative: “people know what they can do but need formal documents to break the circle of low qualification and non-decent wages.”
Those years of effort do not always become years of opportunity. This is where we think Fixa becomes particularly interesting.
Two business lines that reinforce each other
The first is still the commercial engine: tech-enabled staffing and labour deployment into large construction projects. Since launch, the company has created more than 20,000 digital employment identities, facilitated over 1 million shifts and processed more than US$6 million in wages.
This is the business that has built Fixa’s operational muscle. It has also given the team daily proximity to employers, supervisors and thousands of informal workers. To us, that was a much better place to build software from than sitting outside the market and trying to persuade companies to digitise.
The second business is the bigger, longer-term play. Fixa has built workforce management software for employers managing large frontline workforces. Attendance, onboarding, payroll, compliance and reporting now sit in one platform. Workers can access their own records through simple mobile tools, including USSD. This is not a pivot away from staffing.
Fixa realised the infrastructure it had built to run its own operations could solve the same problem for hundreds of other large employers. The company spent several years testing the software on itself before selling it to anyone else.
Fixa has recently signed commercial contracts with large employers in mining, agriculture and tea, suggesting to us that the software was starting to stand on its own. Those sectors can look very different from construction, but the workforce problem is familiar: large numbers of workers, manual attendance systems, messy payroll, limited worker visibility and very little portable employment history.
On the surface, this can look like HR software, but we think it is much more interesting than that! Each payroll run deepens a worker’s earnings history, and each attendance record adds another layer of trust to a profile that simply did not exist a year earlier. As those records accumulate, the value compounds well beyond the payroll.
Why markets (desperately) need this data
The first benefit of that data is actually not financial. It makes labour markets work better. Employers have a better way to identify reliable workers, while workers can carry a trusted employment history from one job to the next, rather than starting from scratch each time. In informal labour markets where recruitment is still driven largely by word of mouth, that alone has tremendous value.
.png)
Financial services come later. That is the third layer of the business. Earned wage access for example allows informal workers to cover expenditure before payday.
Fixa’s own impact survey found that over 95% of its workers were accessing earned wages for the first time in their lives. Over time, the ambition is much broader: savings, insurance, credit and other financial products built around verified work histories instead of guesswork.
That sequencing is one of the reasons we invested. We’ve seen plenty of businesses try to sell financial services into the informal economy before they have earned trust or built meaningful data. This was a core finding in our Microenterprise sector scan.
Fixa is approaching the problem from the opposite direction: solve a real operational problem for employers first, build trusted employment records as a by-product, then use those records to unlock better financial services for workers.
One of the conclusions from our recent Gendered Realities research was that platforms can become much more than marketplaces. They can become digital verifiers of women’s skills and professional identity, allowing reputation to travel with workers instead of disappearing each time a job ends. This is critical to levelling the playing gender-wise. Fixa feels like one of the clearest examples of that idea in practice.
Construction is not where most people would start a conversation about women’s economic inclusion! That is why we found it so interesting. Around 30% of workers on the platform today are women, which is way higher than many would expect in the sector.
But construction was never the end market. If this works, the same infrastructure should apply in agriculture, manufacturing, hospitality and other sectors where women make up a much larger share of the workforce.
During our due diligence, we spoke to 18 women already working through Fixa to understand whether the worker experience matched the story. All but one said they were satisfied with Fixa’s services and would recommend the company to others.
Women talked about more reliable access to work, better visibility over their earnings, and the ability to pay school fees, buy livestock, cover rent, invest in health insurance and manage emergencies without relying on informal lenders.
Francine’s story captures the upside. She is a carpenter who had spent years navigating informal construction work before joining Fixa. With more consistent work, reliable income and access to earned wage access, she was able to help finish her family home, keep her children in school, pay off debt and start saving for the future:
.png)
“We recently completed the construction of a house at home, and I am really proud of that. My kids did not have to stop going to school; I am able to also afford their insurance”
Through our venture support, we’ll be working with the Fixa team as they expand into sectors with higher women participation, refine how they position the software with employers and use the Jobtech Alliance Inclusivity Framework to pressure test the product’s inclusivity through a gender lens. Our framework looks beyond headline participation rates, asking whether women experience the platform differently, whether products create unintended barriers and where relatively small changes could produce better outcomes for women and marginalised groups.
Visible, verifiable and portable at scale
When we first met Fixa, we thought we were looking at a solid staffing company. Two years later, we think we’re looking at something quite different. The staffing business is what gives Fixa access to employers, workers and the data that connects them. But we think that’s the means, not the end.
The real opportunity is making informal work visible, verifiable and portable at scale.
We think every worker deserves to own a verified employment identity for all the work they’ve done. If that became part of Africa’s labour market infrastructure, Fixa would have helped build it.