Kenya’s Naivasha Born into a family of farmers, Caroline Njau grew up in the mountainous region around Nyahururu, 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Nairobi, where they tend to fields of maize, wheat, and potatoes.
However, Njau has made a different life decision.
The 30-year-old currently resides in Naivasha, a charming town halfway between Nairobi and Nyahururu that is the hub of Kenya’s flower industry. While enjoying a cup of milk tea in her living room, she labels data on an app for artificial intelligence (AI) businesses located overseas. As she carefully draws boxes around various objects, including traffic lights, automobiles, pedestrians, and other objects, she flips between photographs of tarmac roads, crossroads, and walkways on her smartphone as the sun rises over the gravel streets of her neighborhood.
markers. She is paid $3 per hour by the app’s designer, an American subcontractor to Silicon Valley businesses.
As a self-described “annotator,” Njau gathers the fundamental pieces of data that teach artificial intelligence to identify patterns in the real world—in this case, using self-driving cars.
“My parents find technology difficult to learn, therefore they haven’t embraced it entirely. But science has always fascinated me. With just your phone and an internet connection, you may generate opportunities through data annotation, according to Njau, a teaching graduate who has been annotating since 2021.
Kenya is starting to compete with nations like India and the Philippines as a hub for this kind of online work. A big percentage of the youth in this sector work in digital jobs, thanks to the rise of tech start-ups since the late 2000s, the entry of tech outsourcing businesses, business-friendly policies, skilled labor, and high-speed internet. At least 1.2 million Kenyans are employed online, the majority of them unofficially, according to a Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) survey conducted in 2021.
