by DAMILARE DOSUNMU & TESSIE WAITHIRA
An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.
- Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day.
- The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like digital factory floors.
- Kenya’s weak labor protections and soaring youth unemployment have made it a hot spot for cheap AI labor, prompting officials and unions to warn of a new form of digital colonialism as the government rushes to draft regulations.
It’s 3 a.m. in Nairobi, and Ken’s laptop and phone glow in the dark. On one screen, waves crash against a beach in a video, and on the other, a woman stretches into a yoga pose. He has watched each clip several times, trying to decide whether or not it’s in slow motion.
His phone buzzes. In a WhatsApp message, a teammate informs him that she has already labelled 2,200 video clips that day, 200 short of her daily goal. “Are you close to the target? I am so sleepy, I think I will continue tomorrow,” she says.
Ken, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, fearing loss of work, is among the young Kenyans quietly fueling China’s artificial intelligence ambitions from Nairobi. For as little as 700 Kenyan shillings ($5.42), the workers — mostly university students and recent graduates — spend around 12 hours a day labeling thousands of short videos for China-based companies.
Kenya has long been a data labor hub for U.S. tech giants like Meta and OpenAI. Rest of World’s reporting shows that in recent months, Chinese AI firms have been moving in, but with less transparency.
“Chinese AI firms have quietly become some of the world’s largest buyers of human-labeled data. What distinguishes their expansion isn’t just scale, but opacity — a low-visibility supply chain stitched across East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East,” Payal Arora, professor of inclusive AI culture, media, and culture studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Rest of World. “Unlike the U.S. firms that are increasingly scrutinized, the Chinese operations often operate through layers of subcontractors, making accountability far harder to trace. … The lack of transparency means we know far less about labor conditions, wage structures, or worker protections than we should.”
Rest of World reached out to some of China’s largest AI companies to inquire if they outsource data labeling work to Kenya and how they connect with workers in the country, but did not receive responses.
Over the past decade, U.S. tech companies have relied on Kenyan workers for back-end tech work such as data labeling. Companies including Meta, Google, and OpenAI work with outsourcing firms like Sama, CloudFactory, and Turing in Kenya. These arrangements have led to a series of complaints about low pay, toxic office culture, and the traumatic nature of work without mental health support. In recent years, companies have faced public protests and several court cases in Kenya as local workers challenge how Silicon Valley employers treat them.
China, which is challenging the U.S.’ dominance in global AI, is tapping Kenyan workers for similar assignments. Unlike American companies, however, Chinese firms tend to outsource work more informally.
Rest of World spoke to 10 annotators who said they work for Chinese companies, based on the nature of the content they annotate. A few team leaders said they have met their Chinese managers over calls. None of the annotators knew the names of the companies behind the projects. They only knew the middlemen: third-party companies or agents.
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