Africa Tech Workers Movement

Africa Tech Workers Movement (ATWM) is a Kenya-rooted coalition of worker-led organisations representing the content moderators, data labellers, gig drivers, and other digital workers whose labour underpins the global AI and platform economy. Kenyan reporting on the September 2025 Business Laws (Amendment) Bill 2024 petition describes the digital workers organising in Kenya as "united under the Africa Tech Workers Movement", a coalition framing rather than a single registered entity. Its public face is built around a handful of co-founders — most prominently former Samasource data labeller and mathematics graduate Naftali Wambalo, who is identified in reporting on the April 2026 Sama redundancies as a co-founder of the Movement — and around shared cause with The Oversight Lab and the litigation lineage out of Nzili & Sumbi Advocates and Foxglove.

Constituent organisations

Kenyan media identify ATWM as the umbrella under which a set of recent African worker-led organisations co-ordinate. Four bodies are consistently named:

• Techworker Community Africa (TCA) — a worker-led network providing civic education, free psychological support, and rights training to African tech workers across AI, content moderation, and digital-platform sectors.
• African Tech Workers Rising (ATWR) — a UNI Global Union project to organise frontline content moderators and data-enrichment workers in the AI data supply chain. ATWR organiser Sonia Kgomo, a former Kenyan Facebook moderator, represented African data workers at the February 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris with the line, "We are an unseen force behind AI breakthroughs, and we're on the front lines of keeping technology safe for our communities."
• African Content Moderators Union (ACMU) — the union voted into existence in May 2023 by 150-plus content moderators working for Meta, TikTok, and ChatGPT outsourcers, at a Nairobi summit organised in part by Daniel Motaung.
• Data Labellers Association (DLA) — the worker-led DLA was launched in Kenya in 2025 for data annotators and labellers across Africa, with 339 members joining in its first week. Its founding president is named in reporting on the African data-worker movement as Joan Kinyua.

The April 2025 Nairobi launch of the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators — convened by UNI Global Union with workers from nine countries and with Kenya's Communication Workers Union (COWU) participating — sits alongside the Movement as a parallel internationalising vehicle for the same constituency.

Worker-power litigation: the Business Laws Bill 2024 challenge

In September 2025 a group of 35 tech workers — drawn from content moderation, ride-hailing, and other platform sectors and supported by The Oversight Lab — filed a petition in the Kenyan High Court challenging the Business Laws (Amendment) Bill 2024. Their case argued that Kenya's Senate had passed the Bill without the public-participation sessions required by the Constitution, and that the Bill had been engineered to grant tech companies effective immunity from worker-rights suits in Kenyan courts — a response to the September 2024 Court of Appeal ruling that had allowed the Meta and Sama content-moderation cases to proceed in Kenya. Kenyan reporting frames the petition as a Movement action, with ATWM as the cross-sector organising vehicle binding the petitioners together.

Response to the April 2026 Sama redundancies

When Meta abruptly terminated its content-moderation contract with Samasource Kenya EPZ Limited (Sama) and Sama issued a redundancy notice on 16 April 2026 covering 1,108 workers, ATWM became one of the principal worker-side voices in the response. Naftali Wambalo, speaking for the Movement, alleged that "Meta was retaliating against the workers who spoke out" about the Ray-Ban smart glasses footage that had been routed to Nairobi for review, and characterised Meta's reasoning as "standards of secrecy" rather than standards of quality. The Oversight Lab, in turn, urged the affected Sama workers to join the Movement "to advocate for safer, more stable environments" while it advised them on legal options.

Posture in the movement

ATWM sits at the worker-organising end of the African AI-accountability ecosystem that has formed around Nairobi: structurally a coalition rather than a single organisation, animated by the same casework lineage as Foxglove, Nzili & Sumbi Advocates, and The Oversight Lab, and engaging non-AI publics — content moderators, data labellers, ride-hailing drivers, gig workers — in the question of how Big Tech builds and deploys AI on the continent. The Movement's public visibility is uneven: it is consistently named in Kenyan reporting on the Business Laws Bill petition and on the Sama redundancies, but does not (as of May 2026) appear to maintain a primary public-facing website of its own, and is best understood through the published activities of its constituent organisations and the small set of co-founders who speak in its name.