Refugees in Kenya do tech gig work for shrinking pay, Guardian finds

Refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp are doing remote tech work for global companies while their pay shrinks and becomes harder to predict, according to an investigation by The Guardian. Some now accept tasks that pay discretionary “rewards” instead of guaranteed wages, including research for a platform owned by the British company RWS.

What happened

The Guardian interviewed more than two dozen refugees in Kakuma, a camp near Kenya’s northern border with South Sudan. The camp has existed for more than 30 years. Its more than 300,000 residents depend almost entirely on humanitarian aid, and refugees there cannot legally work in Kenya. For many of them, remote online tasks for overseas clients are one of the few ways to earn money.

One refugee, who used the name Grace because of a nondisclosure agreement, described researching translations of Christian hymns for AOP Connect. This crowdsourced research platform is owned by RWS, a British AI enterprise software company. The hymn project was advertised with $9,000 in rewards. A notice on the listing said this sum would be shared among an unknown number of contributors as discretionary rewards, not guaranteed wages. RWS documents reviewed by The Guardian said a researcher could receive up to $500 if their work met six quality criteria. A mentor at the Solidarity Initiative for Refugees (SIR) told the paper that most people earn much less than that and are not told why.

An AOP Connect spokesperson told The Guardian that the reward structure is explained “transparently upfront”, that pay depends on quality, relevance and timeliness, and that the platform is “not AI-enabled or used for AI-model training work”. RWS also said AOP Connect does not offer data annotation work.

The wider picture is a fall in entry-level work. Bahana Hydrogene, a Congolese refugee who set up SIR’s digital skills programmes in 2016, said workers used to earn 500 to 1,000 Kenyan shillings, or $3 to $6, a day on Remotasks. That Scale AI subsidiary left Kenya in 2024. The International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, estimates that jobs such as transcription, data entry, translation and web research have fallen by about 50% since 2022. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute also found that the growth of popular AI tools coincided with a measurable drop in many of these jobs.

Merci Biamungu, a refugee trained in 3D modelling, told The Guardian he had not found remote tech work for two years. In one of his last projects, he and 20 other workers competed in teams of five, and the winning team shared a reward of 15,000 shillings, or about $116. “We used to get three to five jobs per month,” he said. “Now you cannot get one.”

Refugee data annotators also said they had been asked to label images and videos of weapons, serious injuries and pornography. Hydrogene said some workers who had fled wars developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result.

Why it matters if you live in United Kingdom

The story has several direct links to Britain.

• A British company is involved. The research platform at the centre of Grace’s account belongs to RWS, which The Guardian describes as a British AI enterprise software company. UK readers who follow how British firms treat workers abroad may want to read the company’s response alongside the workers’ accounts.
• The research comes from Oxford. Some of the evidence on disappearing jobs comes from the Oxford Internet Institute. Mark Graham, its professor of internet geography, told The Guardian that “the language of ‘rewards’ instead of wages shifts risk entirely on to workers”.
• It shows how everyday AI tools are made. Anyone in the UK who uses chatbots or social media is using products that, according to The Guardian, were partly built on datasets handled by low-paid workers in low-income countries, including refugees. Some workers said they had contributed to products they did not know about. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Somali speakers in Kakuma had done transcription work that was likely used by the US military, which refugees said they had not agreed to.
• It is a warning about entry-level jobs. A South Sudanese software engineer in the camp said senior engineers “are not hiring interns or junior roles” as AI takes over basic tasks. Hubert Sanga, founder of the social enterprise Generation Aid, said “one hundred per cent of the jobs we are doing right now are really at risk”. This matters to anyone in the UK who is starting a career in tech, especially newcomers who use freelance platforms to build experience.

What to watch next

The Guardian’s reporting raises questions that are still open. One is whether platforms that pay through discretionary rewards will give clearer explanations of how work is assessed. Workers and trainers told the paper that this is the main gap. Hydrogene said refugees “can’t get transparent answers from these companies”, and that clients often threaten to move work to the Philippines or India if he asks for higher pay.

Another question is the role of worker advocacy. Joan Kinyua, founding president of the Nairobi-based Data Labelers Association, told The Guardian she saw pay and conditions for data annotation getting worse as early as 2018. Her organisation campaigns for what it calls the tech industry’s “invisible architects”.

Finally, the situation in Kakuma itself is worth following. The Guardian reports that many families there face starvation, partly because USAID was dismantled last year. Training groups such as SIR, which has trained more than 2,000 refugees and connected more than half of them with remote tech work, now have to prepare students for a job market in which, as Na’amal founder Lorraine Charles said, “some jobs started to dry up” as AI went mainstream.

Source: The Guardian