Naftali Wambalo

Kenyan former Samasource data labeller and co-founder of the Africa Tech Workers Movement. A mathematics graduate and father of two from Nairobi, Wambalo worked as a "human in the loop" for Samasource Kenya on contracts for Meta and OpenAI — eight-hour shifts drawing bounding boxes on images for AI training and reviewing pornography, hate speech, and graphic violence for content-moderation queues at $1.50–$2 per hour gross. He is one of roughly 200 digital workers suing Sama and Meta in Kenya over the working conditions and psychological harm of that pipeline; a psychiatric evaluation of the cohort confirmed sustained mental-health damage, which Wambalo himself attributes to the volume of sexual and violent material he was required to label.

As a co-founder of the Africa Tech Workers Movement Wambalo has become one of the Movement's principal public voices on the Sama–Meta pipeline. After Meta abruptly terminated its content-moderation contract with Sama in April 2026 — the immediate trigger for a redundancy notice covering 1,108 workers — Wambalo, speaking for the Movement, alleged that "Meta was retaliating against the workers who spoke out" about the Ray-Ban Meta footage routed to Nairobi for review, and characterised Meta's stated rationale as "standards of secrecy" rather than standards of quality. The Ray-Ban Meta footage scandal sits at the centre of the Oversight Lab petition that triggered the ODPC's 31 March 2026 own-motion investigation into Meta's smart-glasses pipeline; Wambalo's public commentary places the Movement on the worker-organising side of the same campaign.