Kenya bet its graduates on gig work in 2022. ChatGPT launched that year

In 2022 Kenya adopted a ten-year national plan to move its graduates into online outsourcing work. OpenAI released ChatGPT the same year.

Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur set out what happened next, reporting from Nairobi for the New York Times with Edwin Okoth. At its peak early this decade, researchers estimated at least 40,000 people in Nairobi were paid to do other people’s homework. The industry has since shrunk to almost nothing.

The work was writing essays for cheating students overseas. It was also, in its way, a Kenyan success story. The government had built policy around the wider category it belonged to.

What the work paid

Teresios Bundi was the first in his family to go to university. He moved to Nairobi from a farming village in 2011, and a friend suggested a new kind of online job.

His first assignment earned $7 for three hours. It was a two-page essay on the health benefits of a fruit he had never heard of, for a student he knew nothing about. He estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over twelve years, sometimes three a day. He was completing his own public health degree at the time. Some students handed him their university logins so he could keep up with their coursework.

He graduated in 2015 and did not use the degree. He started a business charging $40 to $70 a paper. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, fast internet and mattresses. The students he hired wrote between classes and slept when they could not.

It paid at least five times what public health would have. His parents are coffee farmers who took out a loan to buy him a laptop. Around Nairobi the money showed: new Subarus, current phones, tables at the clubs.

The policy was built on the same ground

Cheap high-speed internet reached Kenya around 2009. The government came to see online outsourcing as a route up the economic ladder. Transcription, data entry, graphic design, web development, basic coding. Nobody officially condoned essay writing, but it fitted the shape.

In 2016 the state began training university graduates to work the freelance platforms. In 2022 it adopted a ten-year National Digital Masterplan that leaned further into outsourcing and gig work.

The problem it was built to solve is real. More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year. Roughly 80% of work in that economy is informal, and youth unemployment runs above 25%. Around 40% of the country’s 54 million people live in poverty. Thin opportunity has fed a Gen Z protest movement.

John Tanui, principal secretary at the ministry responsible, told the Times he stands by Kenya’s potential as an outsourcing hub. It would, he said, unlock opportunities for young people.

Transcription went first, in 2017

The essay collapse is the loud version of something that started earlier and quieter.

Frida Mwangi turned to transcription in 2015 while raising four children. She transcribed interviews with Ellis Island immigrants and worked on medical files. From 2017 the work began drying up, because transcription was among the first jobs software could do.

Her wages fell. Employers told her to run the audio through AI and fix what it got wrong. She found that slower than transcribing herself, because the models mangled medical terms. The jobs went anyway. “My job went completely,” she said. She now campaigns for gig workers.

Kenya’s outsourcing boom also drew a backlash over pay and conditions, and some of it retreated on its own. Sama, which hired Kenyans to moderate content for Meta, cut back. Scale AI discontinued some Kenyan operations.

The number that says this is not finished

Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety run an index that measures how much online freelance work leading models can actually complete, across things like product design and data analysis.

Last October the models managed 2.5% of the tasks. By July they managed 16%.

Mark Graham, an Oxford professor who studies the global gig economy, put the wider point to the Times plainly. “A.I. has come in and taken big chunks of these labor markets,” he said, and Kenya will not be the only place.

What is left is called humanising

Essay work has not vanished entirely. The jobs that remain are mostly for people who edit AI-written papers so they will not trip the detection software universities now run.

One writer, who gave the Times only her first name because she fears for her future job prospects, says business is as good as ever. She drafts with AI and rewrites by hand, and avoids the tools built to disguise machine text, preferring her own. Students without writing experience, she said, are the ones who get caught.

The detectors are not reliable either. One flagged a Berkeley professor for an op-ed she wrote herself. The demand side has moved too. An MIT committee found in August that AI can answer almost any written assignment in its undergraduate curriculum. That is why nobody needs to hire a stranger in Nairobi.

The same month, elsewhere

Kenya is not an isolated market. Amazon closes Mechanical Turk on 30 September, twenty-one years after it began paying people a few cents to do what software could not. Meta spent the first half of this year planning to cut some teams by 60% and hand the work to AI. Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda last week while cutting a tenth of its workforce.

Bundi now works for a German government development organisation, helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. He misses the work, the deadlines and the subjects he had to learn from scratch. He called it a parallel education.

He also has the sentence that explains why this story is not really about essay mills. “A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it’s coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects,” he said. “It’s coming for everybody.”

His own arithmetic is narrower. The peers who stayed in public health after 2015 have risen through the ranks. If he went back now he would start at entry level, working for someone who graduated last year.