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 organized 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.
For as little as 700 Kenyan shillings ($5.42), workers spend up to 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. Recent reporting shows that Chinese AI firms are moving in, but with far 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.”
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 complaints about low pay, toxic office culture, and the psychological strain of work without mental health support. Public protests and court cases have arisen as workers challenge how Silicon Valley treats them.
China, which is challenging U.S. dominance in global AI, is tapping Kenyan workers for similar assignments, but tends to outsource work more informally. Workers spoke of being onboarded through Google Forms, coordinated via WhatsApp groups, and paid through the local fintech app M-Pesa. There are no formal contracts, and short-term projects often require seven-day work weeks.
“We just get on the platform where some Chinese [managers] organize the work. We have no idea what they are doing with this annotation work,” David, who has been doing this work for three months, told Rest of World. He asked to be identified by a pseudonym for fear of losing income.
Workers have no access to formal email IDs, contracts, human resources systems, or offices. They handle annotation tasks on portals with no publicly available information, and instructions and feedback come solely through automated WhatsApp reports. Teams are ranked daily on output and accuracy, and must maintain at least 85% accuracy to get paid.
“The bigger the project, the more people we hire and the lower the rates [we offer],” a Kenyan supervisor told Rest of World. “We cannot have people full-time [staff with employment benefits], so we set that expectation.”
“It’s capitalism and the height of digital colonialism. Oftentimes, supervisors don’t even mention who you are working for, but you’d be able to tell from the faces in the content,” Joan Kinyua, president of the Data Labelers Association, a Nairobi-based AI workers’ union, told Rest of World. “AI may feel futuristic, but it is built on profoundly old-world economics.”
Chinese companies have been accused of exploiting student interns back home. In 2023, Rest of World reported that vast armies of low-wage data annotators were recruited from vocational schools or routed through “inland-sourced” labeling centers in poorer provinces to keep costs low and scale quickly.
“AI may feel futuristic, but it is built on profoundly old-world economics. Models look automated, but behind the scenes, they are propped up by armies of low-paid workers doing psychologically draining tasks for just a few dollars a day,” Arora said. “Companies rely on cheap annotation not because it’s optional, but because the current AI business model depends on absorbing massive training costs while still competing on speed. Cheap labor is the silent subsidy keeping the AI boom afloat. … Without fair labor practices, the future of AI will be fast — but fundamentally unjust.”
Chronic youth unemployment in Kenya, which stood at 67% as of July 2025, has made this labor force attractive for global outsourcing. “Kenya is attractive for global outsourcing because if you look into the global BPO [business process outsourcing] index, Kenya hits all the top spots: language, literacy, power stability, and a tech-savvy population familiar with Western culture,” Shikoh Gitau, founder and CEO of Nairobi-based IT provider Qhala, told Rest of World. “Our time zone works magic. We can work with the West Coast of the U.S. and the east coast of Asia without much adjustment.”
Gitau emphasized that while such work provides income for young Kenyans, the country “must proactively build policies and frameworks that guide the industry and ensure our people are protected.”
“They [companies] are all here simply because of cheap labor,” Kinyua said. “Companies know Kenyans will give them quality work done at very minimal or zero cost. At times, these workers don’t get paid because they don’t have a direct link with the organization they’ve been working for or what their work is helping to build. No contracts, even so, it’s your words against theirs.”
Kenyan authorities are aware of local workers taking up data annotation tasks with Chinese companies, but current labor laws do not protect them. Florence Kimata, a member of the Kenya National Innovation Technical Committee, told Rest of World that the government is working to draft regulations prioritizing vulnerable workers.
“A lot of work is going on around firmly identifying who should be held accountable as the employers of these workers, between the outsourcing firms and the companies contracting them,” Kimata said. “The framework should have been finalized by July of this year, but there is more consulting work still ongoing between the labor body and the labor ministry, and the ICT [information and communication technology] ministry.”