In December 2024, Kenya’s President William Ruto waded into the heart of two lawsuits that were attempting to set a new precedent in Kenya, one of the destinations for major tech companies looking to farm out digital work to the African continent.
The three-year legal battle stems from allegations of human rights violations at an outsourced Meta content moderation facility in Nairobi. Employees hired by a contractor were paid as little as $1.50 per hour to view and rate content to be removed, including videos of rape, murder and war crimes.
At a town hall event in Nairobi, President Ruto said he was preparing to sign a Bill into law that he claimed would prevent outsourcing companies from being sued in Kenya in the future.
“Those people were taken to court, and they had real trouble,” he said, referring to Sama, the outsourcing company that directly employed the Facebook content moderators.
“They really bothered me. Now I can report to you that we have changed the law, so nobody will take you to court again on any matter.”
President Ruto said Sama had planned to relocate to Uganda “because many of us were giving them trouble.” And he cast the change to the law as an effort to make Kenya a more attractive location for outsourcing companies, similar to India or the Philippines, in order to bring much-needed jobs to the country.
On Tuesday, Kenyan digital workers expressed fierce opposition to senators over the approval of a controversial Bill they argue is discriminatory. The legislation, designed to oversee digital labour in the country, would also grant tech companies legal immunity against lawsuits. It will now head to the National Assembly for the same review.
According to the workers, the recently endorsed law is in bad faith and only aims to protect foreign companies at the expense of Kenyan workers, who are usually mistreated.
Tech workers from various associations united to protest the Senate's approval of the Business Laws (Amendment) Bill 2024, also known as Senate Bill No 51 of 2024. The legislation was passed without public consultation, disregarding the communities that will be affected the most, they argued.
In March of this year, workers formally requested the opportunity to present their concerns about the Bill to the Senate, but this request was ignored. By April, they had submitted four detailed memoranda proposing essential changes to protect workers' rights. Yet none of these recommendations were taken into account.
By May, the Bill had advanced to its second reading without even a committee report. Then, on August 7, it was passed into law, completely disregarding the constitutional requirement for public participation.
In an interview with The EastAfrican , Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer from the Tech Workers Movement, and also leading the cases against Meta and Sama at the law firm
“It grants immunity to tech companies, including those that persistently underpay, discriminate against and exploit tech workers.
“This shows a betrayal of the people who power Kenya's digital economy. A digital economy that continues to grow while those behind it continues to suffer in silence,” she said.
Joan Kinyua, President of the Data Labellers Association of Kenya, expressed her deep concern about how the Senate passed the Bill, especially the total disregard for the constitutional requirement for meaningful public participation.
“We must now caution both Houses of Parliament, particularly the National Assembly, against receiving and acting on the flawed Bill,” said Ms Kinyua.
She added that their organisations are issuing notices of intended legal action to reverse these violations should Parliament proceed to validate and entrench the illegality.
The group announced that they have instructed their legal teams to scrutinise every detail of the legislative process for non-compliance, and to analyse each clause of the bill for potential constitutional violations. If Parliament fails to take satisfactory corrective action, they plan to challenge the Bill in court.
According to Ms Mutemi, if the Sama case is successful, the lawsuits could enshrine a new precedent into Kenyan law that Big Tech companies, not just their outsourcing partners, are legally liable for any wrongdoing that happens inside subcontracted facilities.
Supporters say that this will boost workers’ rights and guard against exploitative work in Kenya’s data labelling sector, which is booming thanks to growing demand for AI training data. But opponents argue that such a decision would make Kenya a less attractive place for foreign firms to do business, potentially resulting in a loss of jobs and hindered economic development.
“We agree that the law needs to be amended to reflect the new categories of work, for example, the gig economy and platform work,” Mutemi says. “However, the bill that has been passed by the Senate does not offer any protections to the workers. It seems to be prioritising the protection of the outsourcing companies and the tech companies at the expense of workers' rights.”
The tech workers have mostly included content moderators, data labellers, annotators, ride-hailing workers, delivery workers, remote workers, content creators and online freelancers.
Major tech companies outsource moderation and other jobs to the Global South, including African nations such as Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Madagascar, although others like India and Venezuela have been used too.
