By Nick Markham & Wyclife Aketch

Africa is entering the largest labour market expansion in modern history.

By 2034, Africa’s workforce will surpass China’s. By 2043, it will exceed one billion people. Half of all new entrants to the global labour force between now and 2050 will be African. 

But most will not find formal jobs. From 2005 to 2023, formal jobs across Africa grew at just 0.6% annually 

Some will find gig work. Many will create their own livelihoods. But the majority will rely on micro and small enterprises for survival. MSMEs already account for most (84%)  employment across the continent.

If Africa does not develop systems to help people find work, build businesses, and generate income, every other challenge—from climate resilience to healthcare—will become exponentially harder. Employment is the foundation on which resilience, opportunity and autonomy are built. 

Employment is one of the continent’s most untapped markets—vast, informal and just waiting to be organised. The platforms that help people find work, sell goods, or access income are tapping into daily demand worth billions. This is particularly true given the demographic dividend sub-Saharan African nations have, they are expected to supply nearly two-thirds of new workforce entrants in the coming years. 

Jobtech is crucial to the future of work but most investors don’t see that (yet)

Across Africa’s hundreds of active investment firms, a small share explicitly include the future of work or jobtech in their theses. In our own Jobtech Investment Network of more than 80 funds, roughly one in four do. This gap alone speaks volumes about how much value remains uncaptured.

We think part of the answer is structural. Many funds are constrained by LP mandates that narrowly define what counts as fintech, commerce, or climate. If jobtech does not appear in those categories, GPs may see the potential but lack the flexibility to allocate. The work of shifting capital into jobtech, therefore, starts upstream, influencing mandate design at the LP level.

There is also a perception issue. African venture capital has clearly been shaped by the success of fintech, defined by fast-scaling, asset-light, clean monetisation paths. Jobtech platforms often look different. They carry heavier operational burdens early on, oftentimes building their own infrastructure, integrating payments, or providing training. 

Many jobtech platforms resemble SMEs in their early stages. They are operationally intensive, deeply tied to local networks, and often grow through incremental service improvements rather than blitzscaling. For investors, this can feel unfamiliar, but it is precisely these SME-like foundations that create incredibly defensible businesses once scaled.

This is exactly why the Jobtech Alliance was founded—to drive interest and investment in the sector, while creating jobs for the hundreds of millions of young Africans that need them. Jobtech is young but growing rapidly. And the investment profile of jobtech platforms is increasingly compelling. 

An inflection point is here

Over the past two years, a rapidly growing number of jobtech platforms have raised meaningful capital and proven the commercial viability of their business models.  Some of the exemplary platforms in our portfolio that we have worked with are:

• Selar enables over 1.5 million African creators to monetise their influence through digital products and has paid out over USD 10 million to its users while being fully bootstrapped.
• Flowcart is transforming African B2B trade through WhatsApp-based conversational commerce, backed by recent seed extension funding of USD 1.55 million led by EQ2 Ventures, alongside Accion Venture Lab, Musha Ventures, Quona Capital, and existing investors CRE Venture. Cumulatively, Flowcart has raised over USD 3.4 million in funding. 
• Bumpa helps African MSMEs manage their retail operations, processing millions of orders, and a GMV exceeding USD 75 million while attracting global investors such as Base 10 partners who led their last $4m seed round funding, together with Plug & Play Ventures, DFS Labs, SHL Capital, Magic Fund, Jedar Capital.
• Opareta is building the operating system for analog agent networks, the backbone of African distribution networks. Cumulatively, it has raised approximately $2 million in pre-seed funding from Renew Capital, The Fintech Fund and Idea Foundry. 
• Rwazi recently raised a USD 12 million Series A to power distributed data collection and market intelligence. The round was led by Bonfire Ventures, which also led their 2022 seed round of USD 4 million,

The pattern is consistent across these: recurring demand, payment adjacent monetisation, and improving payback periods. Most began with SME-like operations and deep customer relationships. Those foundations are now translating into healthy unit economics, strong retention, and clear paths to scale.

Across the Jobtech Alliance portfolio of 46 companies, most are now growing revenues at strong double-digit to mostly triple-digit year-on-year growth and have collectively secured more than USD 35 million in venture funding. 

The underlying reason is simple: Africa’s entrepreneurial energy is vast, and platforms that help people work better, sell more, or learn faster are tapping into daily demand. A green energy installer trained on a jobtech platform, a merchant expanding sales through conversational commerce, or a creator monetising digital content are not abstract use cases. They are real businesses being unlocked.

Recent deals also point to M&A momentum. Selected acquisitions include ANKA being acquired by Global Shop Group , Logidoo acquiring Kamtar, MaxAB-Wasoko merging, then acquiring Fatura and Q-Sourcing Servtec (QSS) Group acquiring FLIP Africa Ltd. We are still early, of course, but the trajectory is clear.

For growth stage investors, the challenge is not just conviction but scale. While interest in jobtech is certainly growing, the number of companies at Series A and beyond remains limited. Network effects certainly take longer to build in Africa than in other markets, but consolidation is coming. When today’s jobtech platforms cross that threshold, growth capital will move quickly. The investors building relationships now will be best positioned when scale ready opportunities emerge.

Returns and impact are not opposites!

Investors often frame a choice between impact and returns. Jobtech shows the two are not mutually exclusive. Platforms that create work also unlock spending power, productivity, and customer bases for countless other sectors. They are networked growth engines. Multipliers by design. When a small business grows, it spends more on payments, logistics, and infrastructure. When a gig worker earns more, they become a better customer for financial services and commerce. When a creator monetises their digital skills, they generate demand for training and digital tools.

The role of philanthropy

As discussed, many jobtech platforms face heavier upfront operational costs, require time to build trust and networks, and often have to layer in services like training or logistics before revenue scales. This is where catalytic capital matters. It reduces early-stage risk, supports infrastructure building, and creates public goods, like skills systems that benefit everyone.

This does not only mean traditional grants. We are seeing increasing use of results-based financing and other outcome-linked instruments that allow investors to make commitments tied to job creation. These vehicles have been used to catalyse refugee employment and other high risk areas without crowding out venture capital. The jobtech sector is being de-risked in real time, and the pipeline for venture capital is growing.

AI is raising the stakes

AI is transforming work faster than any technology before it. In developed markets the pressure is on existing professions, as automation erodes traditional white-collar jobs. In Africa, the bigger risk is exclusion. Entire categories of work may disappear before people here ever access them.

This makes jobtech core, not peripheral. In other sectors, AI is largely an efficiency play. For jobtech, it is existential. These platforms are the connective tissue that determine whether African workers are plugged into new AI-enabled workflows or left outside them. The investable edge lies in platforms that combine models and people, turn productivity gains into income, and build data moats through scale. We strongly believe that jobtech is not a hedge against AI. It is how Africa secures a place in the future of work.

What funders risk by waiting

The question is not whether jobtech will matter. It is whether investors will move early enough to benefit from its growth. Platforms are emerging now that will define how Africans work and earn for the next generation.

Investors who wait risk missing the foundational stage of Africa’s employment infrastructure in the same way that some missed the first wave of fintech or digital commerce. Early movers in jobtech capture distribution networks, data moats, and trust that are incredibly hard to replicate later. Although the social stakes are high, this is not just about impact. It is about competitive advantage in Africa’s most foundational market: work itself.

For early-stage investors, this is a moment to shape the sector’s foundations. For growth-stage investors, it is about preparing to move fast when the companies reach scale, because those opportunities will be scarce and highly competitive— take early risk to maximise on the upside. 

How we can help

At Jobtech Alliance, we work at the heart of this transformation. We support early-stage platforms to grow, raise capital, and create quality jobs across the continent. For investors we de-risk entry into this space, accelerate your due diligence with data from more than 700 platforms, and connect you directly with the best companies that fit within your investment thesis. 

If you are an investor serious about Africa’s future of work, we want to help. That might mean a deep dive into emerging sectors, introductions to high-growth platforms, or shaping your investment approach or investment thesis for this moment.

The future of African work is being built now, platform by platform, worker by worker.