Sama - originally founded as Samasource in 2008 by Leila Janah, an American social entrepreneur of Indian descent - is a data annotation and artificial intelligence training company that has employed thousands of Kenyan workers to label the images, text, and video that train machine learning models for companies including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and General Motors. The company's Nairobi operations became one of the largest AI data labelling centres in Africa, and its story sits at the intersection of Silicon Savannah's aspirations, the global AI supply chain, and a contentious debate about what constitutes dignified digital work.
Janah founded Samasource on a simple premise she called "give work, not aid" - that the most effective way to reduce poverty was not charity but employment, and that digital technology could connect low-income workers in developing countries to paid work from multinational corporations. The company recruited workers from Nairobi's informal settlements - Kibera, Mathare, Mukuru - and trained them to perform data annotation tasks: drawing bounding boxes around objects in images, transcribing audio, tagging content categories, and performing the thousands of micro-tasks that machine learning models require to function.
Sama's Nairobi delivery centre grew to employ over 2,000 workers at its peak. Workers earned wages that were above Kenya's minimum wage but modest by international standards - typically KSh 30,000 to KSh 50,000 per month. The work was repetitive and sometimes psychologically taxing. A 2023 Time investigation revealed that Sama workers hired by Meta to moderate content and label data for ChatGPT's safety systems had been exposed to graphic violence, hate speech, and child sexual abuse material, earning as little as $1.50 to $2 per hour. The investigation triggered global debate about the human cost of AI development and the ethics of outsourcing the most disturbing aspects of AI training to low-wage workers in developing countries.
The controversy complicated Sama's narrative. Janah, who died of cancer in 2020 at age 37, had been a widely admired social entrepreneur - a recipient of numerous awards, a frequent speaker at Davos and TED, and a passionate advocate for "impact sourcing" as an alternative to traditional outsourcing. Her vision was that data work would serve as a pathway to economic mobility for Nairobi's urban poor, providing not just income but skills, professional experience, and a foundation for upward mobility. Critics argued that the reality was more complex: the work was monotonous, career progression was limited, and the wage differential between what Sama charged clients and what it paid workers was significant.
Sama rebranded from Samasource in 2021, separating its for-profit AI services division from its nonprofit training operations. The company continued to position itself as an ethical alternative to other business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, emphasising its hiring from disadvantaged communities and its investment in worker training and support services. But the ethical questions persisted: was data annotation a dignified form of digital work that lifted Kenyans out of poverty, or was it a new form of digital piecework that extracted value from vulnerable workers to benefit wealthy technology corporations?
For Silicon Savannah, Sama represented an uncomfortable truth about Kenya's position in the global AI economy. Nairobi had become a significant node in the supply chain that powered the world's most advanced AI systems - not as a creator of the technology but as a provider of the low-cost human labour required to make it work. The company's story raised questions about whether Kenya's tech ecosystem was building genuine technological capability or serving as a back office for Silicon Valley.
See Also
Sources
- Perrigo, Billy. "Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic." Time, January 18, 2023.
- Murgia, Madhumita. "AI's Dirty Secret: The Human Toil Behind Machine Learning." Financial Times, 2019.
- Janah, Leila. Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time. Portfolio/Penguin, 2017.
- Jackson, Tom. "Sama: The AI Data Company Built on Kenyan Labour." Disrupt Africa, 2022.