Data Labellers Association

The Data Labellers Association (DLA) is a Kenya-based worker-led association of data labellers and annotators, officially launched on 13 February 2025 in Nairobi under the theme "Empowering the People Powering AI." Its formation made visible a workforce that powers global AI systems but had not previously had its own representative body. In the first week after launch, 339 members joined, and the association is described in long-form profiles of the organising as having since grown to roughly 800 members, with many members maintaining quiet affiliation out of fear of platform retaliation. Although Kenya-rooted, the DLA has from launch positioned itself as "a continental and transnational space for all data workers" rather than a national-only association.

Founding and structure

The collective that became the DLA began as an informal network of Kenyan data annotators in late 2023, formed around an initial nucleus of ten workers. Founding president is Joan Kinyua, a former Sama data labeller who has worked in the sector since 2017 on projects across self-driving cars, medical diagnostics, and content moderation. The other named officers in Computer Weekly's coverage are Ephantus Kanyugi as vice-president — a 30-year-old former data trainer repeatedly credited as a co-founder — and Michael Geoffrey Abuyabo Asia as secretary.

Working conditions the DLA was formed to challenge

The association's case rests on a thick body of testimony about the sector's working conditions. Across the Computer Weekly, BMZ, and Martijn Arets accounts, the recurring picture is of a workforce paid in cents per multi-hour task — wages reportedly declining from roughly $10 per hour to as little as $2 for three hours of labour as platform competition has intensified — with no pay for rejected work, invasive webcam-based monitoring, repeated exposure to disturbing imagery (including imagery of nudity, of children, and of deceased people), and frequent unresolved pay disputes over withheld wages and sudden account deactivations. Kinyua puts the politics of the work plainly: "The workers power all these technological advancements, but they're paid peanuts and not even recognised."

Demands and programme strands

The DLA frames its work around a small number of clear demands and a structured programme. Across the press coverage and the DLA's own published material, the demands include fair compensation, formal employment contracts with clear terms, access to healthcare and pensions, mental-health support specific to content-moderation trauma, legal assistance with pay disputes, and the right to collective bargaining. The DLA's own page groups its programme into five strands — policy advocacy, mental-health support, civic education and mentorship, skills development, and litigation assistance — while Martijn Arets's profile groups the same activity into four goals (awareness and community-building; policy change and advocacy; mental health and training; research mapping the workforce). The two framings are consistent rather than competing.

Policy work

Despite being only months old, the DLA has already inserted itself into Kenyan and international policy fora. In its first year the association submitted proposals on the Kenyan Business Laws (Amendment) Bill 2024 — the same bill that 35 tech workers, supported by The Oversight Lab, would challenge in the High Court in September 2025 as part of the wider Africa Tech Workers Movement effort — and Kinyua attended an International Labour Conference preparatory meeting in Naivasha in December 2024, as well as signing an open letter to the US President on AI-supply-chain abuses. Kinyua has framed the association's posture in the language of recognition: "We are no longer silent—we shape policy, demand change, and make the world see us."

Place in the wider movement

The DLA is one of the four worker-led bodies named as constituents of the Africa Tech Workers Movement — alongside Techworker Community Africa, African Tech Workers Rising, and the African Content Moderators Union. The DLA's distinct contribution to that coalition is sectoral: it organises data labellers and annotators specifically, rather than content moderators (ACMU's remit) or the broader gig-worker constituency that the Movement spans. The association's named external partners are correspondingly chosen for that sector: Computer Weekly identifies the African Content Moderators Union, Turkopticon (the worker-side project organising Amazon Mechanical Turk annotators), and the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, and the DLA's own public page adds AI Now, Foxglove, the Data Workers' Inquiry, German content moderators in Essen, and Kenyan civic-tech partners Pollicy and Siasa Place (the latter also providing the advocacy researcher to ACMU) as international and local allies.

Posture in the movement

The DLA is a clear case of non-AI publics — in this instance, the Kenyan and pan-African data annotators whose hand-classified examples underwrite the training of generative AI systems — organising collectively to shape how AI is built and deployed. Its salience in the corpus is twofold: as the youngest of the four worker-led bodies inside the Africa Tech Workers Movement, it extends the Nairobi-rooted accountability stack out of content moderation into the upstream data-labelling layer of the AI supply chain; and as a deliberately transnational rather than purely Kenyan formation, it is positioning itself to be the representative voice of African data workers in international labour fora.