- Kenyan AI data annotators
- Expanding online labor market
- Mixed impacts on economy
Caroline Njau hails from a farming family that stretches across the rural region adjacent to Nyahururu, situated approximately 180 kilometres (112 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi, tending to fields of maize, wheat, and potatoes.
However, Njau has opted for an alternative trajectory in life.
The thirty-year-old resides in Naivasha, a picturesque town midway between Nairobi and Nyahururu, at the heart of Kenya’s floral industry. While sipping milk tea in her living room, she uses an application to annotate data for artificial intelligence (AI) firms located overseas. As she draws boxes around various objects—traffic lights, vehicles, pedestrians, and signposts—while scrolling through images of tarmac roads, intersections, and sidewalks on her smartphone as the sun rises above the unpaved streets of her neighbourhood, she is compensated $3 per hour by the app’s designer, an American subcontractor to Silicon Valley firms.
Kenya’s Growing Digital Workforce
Annotator Njau compiles the fundamental components that instruct artificial intelligence to identify patterns in the real world involving self-driving cars through her data annotation.
“My parents’ reluctance to fully adopt technology stems from their inherent resistance to learning. However, I have always cherished science. Opportunities are created through data annotation, and all that is required to do so is a smartphone and an internet connection; no academic degree is required,” explains Njau, who majored in education but has been annotating since 2021.
Kenya is strengthening its position in the online labour industry to contend with countries such as the Philippines and India. Since the late 2000s, the emergence of tech start-ups and tech outsourcing firms, coupled with business-friendly policies, competent labour, and high-speed internet, has contributed to an economy where digital jobs are essential for a significant portion of the youth. KEPSA research from 2021 found that at least 1.2 million Kenyans labour online, mostly informally.
However, data annotators in Nairobi have recently unveiled a less favourable aspect of this sector. Employees of an outsourcing firm in Nairobi detailed the “torture” they endured last year while labelling fragments of text extracted from the darkest corners of the internet to enable OpenAI’s ChatGPT to identify detrimental content in a Time article. The workers were reportedly compensated less than $2 per hour for this work.
Artificial intelligence in the countryside
Notwithstanding these anecdotes, the annotation industry has expanded considerably beyond Nairobi’s confined office environments.
When Kenyan President William Ruto inaugurated a government-sponsored technology centre in Kitale, an agricultural town near the Ugandan border, in mid-January, a young ICT student described how, in three weeks, he had earned $284 by training AI for Silicon Valley companies. He had been utilizing Remotasks, an American platform that compensates independent contractors for data labelling.
After the IT hub’s video went viral, young Kenyans opened Remotasks accounts. This tech hub is one of a series of facilities designed to equip students with marketable tech skills.
“A significant number of young individuals are unemployed. Even those with a computer science degree are unable to find employment. The government is doing the right thing by facilitating young people’s access to online employment,” says 24-year-old nurse Kennedy Cheruyot of Eldoret, western Kenya.
Digital Shift in Kenyan Employment
Since establishing a Remotasks account in 2021, he has continued to gain experience in the medical field through online work. Some of his acquaintances have completely abandoned alternative professions to concentrate on digital endeavours.
“Historically, boys in our culture were expected to work as cattle herders on the farm. Now, they remain indoors and complete their work online,” Cheruyot explains as we meet at a café that overlooks the commercial district of Eldoret. Hardware and agricultural supply stores coexist with luminous yellow signage that promotes cyber cafés, also known as “cybers.”
Even though Cheruyot aspires to own a homestead “like in the Western films,” he is preoccupied with pursuing additional online employment to cover rent, food, electricity, water, and transportation expenses.
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Since 2022, commodity prices in Kenya have increased dramatically due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and an extended drought that year. Meanwhile, the Kenyan shilling has further depreciated as the energy and manufacturing sectors continue to demand dollars. As the value of the shilling declines, import costs and the cost of products for consumers like Cheruyot increase.
He anticipates that should he obtain employment as a nurse, he will continue to earn between $5 and $20 per hour working online during his spare time, contingent on the nature of the work.
“As long as we receive compensation, I could care less if our efforts make Western AI companies prosperous. While it might not seem like much, every dollar counts in Kenya,” he explains.
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