Call for Entrepreneurs: Africa to Italy labour-mobility

Build a high-impact recruitment or training company to help African workers access jobs in Italy

An African hospitality worker in Italy

We are looking for talented founders who want to help African workers access higher-wage and higher-productivity jobs in Italy. Recent legislative changes in Italy have created huge new opportunities for labour mobility and no one has yet built the companies to serve them.

Are you the right person to build a high-impact company training, placing or financing workers to access jobs in Italy?

Why Italy?

Italy’s labour market is facing a severe workforce shortage. This challenge is expected to grow over the coming decades as birth rates continue to decline. By 2050, Italy’s population is projected to fall from around 58 million to 51 million.

At the same time, the population is ageing rapidly, increasing the demand for healthcare and long-term care workers. In 2024, Italy was estimated to be short of around 65,000 nurses, and that gap continues to widen each year.

Despite the growing demand, very few Italian companies specialise in international recruitment from Africa. Most recruitment agencies still focus on the domestic market, while international labour mobility requires coordinating employers, training providers, legal processes and government institutions across multiple countries.

This leaves a significant opportunity for the first companies able to build a trusted, scalable solution.

Italy Has Opened the Door

Italy has opened two main channels for labour mobility, one is the new Decreto Flussi programme, allocating 497,550 legal work-entry quotas for the 2026–2028 period: 164,850 for 2026, 165,850 for 2027, and 166,850 for 2028.

Alongside Decreto Flussi, Italy also now offers extra-quota pathways for specific categories of workers. These pathways are not subject to annual numerical limits, allowing employers to recruit trained and skilled workers from outside the European Union throughout the year when the legal requirements are met. Crucially, this pathway includes a carve-out for workers who are trained abroad in any profession, so long as they reach A1 Italian and take part in a brief vocational training programme. (Art. 23, post-Cutro decree)

We believe these extra-quota pathways represent a huge opportunity. Not only is it a great opportunity for African workers to fill shortage professions in the Italy market, for first-mover companies its an opportunity to shape the whole sector in a high-quality, scalable and sustainable way.

The business and impact model

At Africa Jobs Fund, we measure success through two lenses: the financial performance of the companies we back and the long-term impact they create.

Imagine AJF invests $50,000 to launch a new labour mobility company. The company successfully places its first 100 workers with Italian employers, generating sustainable revenue through placement fees and repeat hiring while becoming financially self-sustaining.

At the same time, each worker’s annual income increases from around €4,500 to €29,000. Across 100 workers, that represents approximately €2.45 million in additional income every year, or roughly €100 million over a working life of 40 years, while significantly increasing consumption back home through remittances.

For us, a successful company is one that delivers both outcomes: a sustainable business with strong financial performance and measurable long-term impact for the people it serves.

Each placement has a huge positive impact

A hospitality worker is a good example of the opportunity we can create.

Italy needs more hospitality workers, while Kenya has many trained professionals with limited local opportunities (some of whom even speak Italian already). By helping a hospitality relocate to Italy, we can improve their long-term career prospects while creating value for both countries through remittances, skills transfer and economic growth.

What you would build

The goal is to build a company that helps more African workers access jobs in Italy in a sustainable and scalable way.

Often, this starts from the demand-side, working with employers in Italy to understand their needs and then working back to build the talent pipeline. This could be a recruitment agency that works with existing training schools in Africa to find workers and then bridges the gap to place them with employers (while managing flights, visas, soft-skills training, etc.)

Alternatively, since there is significant demand on the hiring side and through the recruitment companies AJF is helping to build, you might focus on building a high-quality training school that teaches workers Italian alongside in-demand vocational skills to equip them to work in Italy.

We’re open to a range of models, but the key is simple, effective structures that are unit-cost positive per worker moved and are able to scale to work with 100s or even 1000s of workers each year.

AJF is building an ecosystem in this space so we’ll be able to support with partnerships, advice and capital to make this happen.

Who we’re looking for

This is a demanding cross-border operating role. The founder might be based in Italy or in Africa.

You do not need to have prior experience in labour mobility, you just need to be a fast-learner. Other requirements are:

• Fluent/native Italian language ability - working with employers or teaching Italian is difficult without being fluent.

• A strong business builder - able to build a well-run scalable business

• Values-aligned - motivated by the mission and creating huge income gains for low-income people in Africa (alongside building a successful profitable business)

• Committed for the long term - Ready to build and lead this company over the next 5 to 10 years

Experience in recruitment, migration, healthcare staffing or African markets is useful but not required.

How we work with founders

We back exceptional founders to build new companies from the ground up. We bring sector expertise, networks, and hands-on operational support. We expect founders to bring ambition, rigour, hard work, execution and genuine commitment to the mission.

We invest in two stages. First, a pilot and scoping investment in the tens of thousands of Dollars to validate the opportunity, test the core assumptions, and establish proof of concept.

Where that clears the bar, we follow on with a scale-up investment in the low hundreds of thousands to build out operations and place the first cohort of workers. We invest primarily through concessional debt and revenue-based financing, with equity or grants only in exceptional circumstances.

Get in touch!

If you’re excited about this opportunity then apply to build with us here - https://africajobsfund.com/apply/entrepreneur

Or get in touch with alex[at]africajobsfund.com

And if you know someone who would be a great fit - make sure to share this opportunity with them!