The AI Race in Africa: Building With AI vs Being Built For
G lobal AI companies see Africa as a training data source and an emerging market. African technologists are trying to change that equation. In March 2024, Scale AI’s Remotasks platform — which employed Kenyan and Nigerian data labellers — abruptly shut down operations in both countries after workers logged over 20 hours of work earning less than $1 in total. [1] The same month, Meta, after facing lawsuits in Nairobi, quietly relocated its content moderation operations from Kenya to Ghana, recruiting workers to moderate East African language content from the other side of the continent. [1] These are not isolated incidents. They are the visible surface of a structural condition: Africa contributes its data, its languages, its cognitive labour, and its users to a global AI industry whose value is captured almost entirely elsewhere. The data-labelling market alone is valued at $2.8 billion today and projected to reach $18.3 billion by 2035. [1] African linguistic data — in Wolof, Or...