Despite being globally renowned suppliers of business process outsourcing (BPO) talent, Kenyans and Ugandans tapped to work in the AI industry often get low-skill and low-paying jobs, even though they are highly trained and skilled, discouraging the growth of talent in the sector.

ChatGPT – one of the world’s most famous artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots – was trained mostly by Kenyans, and new research now shows may also have contributed to “deskilling” the youth due to a mismatch of qualifications.

UN Trade and Development (Unctad) Technology and Innovation Report 2025 highlights the stark reality of AI workers in countries such as Kenya, Uganda and India, which are global leaders in BPO work.

A recent survey on micro task platforms and BPO companies showed that in Kenya and India specifically, “highly educated workers, with graduate degrees or specialised educations in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, were often relegated to relatively low-skill tasks such as text and image annotation and content moderation.” “Such significant wastes of human capital may be exacerbated in increasingly connected job markets, in which tasks are outsourced globally,” Unctad warns in the biennial technology report.“Data annotators in developing countries often experience difficult conditions, including up to 10 hours of work per day at wages of less than $2 per hour, engaged in repetitive tasks, and with limited opportunities for career advancement, for example, in Kenya and Uganda.”Essentially, such jobs are eroding Kenya’s rich tech talent, and edging out its competitive advantage in the increasingly growing global tech industry, further widening the technology gap and consequently the income inequality gap.

Read: IMF: AI could worsen income inequalityDespite being highly trained and skilled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Kenyans struggle to find meaningful employment locally and internationally, forcing them to settle for the low-skill AI jobs offered by BPO companies.

Over the years, Kenya has developed more tech talent and is now one of the countries with the fastest growth in developers in Africa and globally.

Between 2022 and 2023, Kenya recorded the second fastest growth in the number of developers listed on coders platform Github at 41 percent, second only to Nigeria’s 45 percent.

Last year, Kenya posted the fastest growth in Github developers at 33 percent, pushing the total number of programmers in the country to over 393,000, the fifth highest in Africa after Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, and Morocco.

Also read: Jobs that will survive AI, and those that won’tThe country is also one of the top four tech start-up giants on the continent, a testament to leading in tech talent and innovation, but this has also been changing over time, with such start-ups starved of cash from investors forcing many of them to scale back operations or fold completely.

Data from the African Venture Capital Association shows that last year, total funding raised by Kenyan start-ups declined by 33 percent to $318 million from $473 million in 2023.

As a result, at least five start-ups closed down after failing to raise follow-up funding, leaving hundreds of talented Kenyans jobless amid tightening economic conditions and falling income.

This came hot on the heels of similar scale-backs and shutdowns in 2023, which also left many in the country without jobs. To protect workers in the tech industry, Unctad proposes key policy changes that need urgent action by State organs.“Translating technological progress into shared prosperity requires labour-friendly policies in three stages: investments in education and skills, in pre-production; labour protection and worker empowerment, in production; and progressive taxation, in post-production,” the UN agency said in the report.

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