‘There’s no contract, no guarantees. You never know in advance how much you’ll earn’

African states want to develop AI attuned to local needs and cultures. But for educated young Africans, the reality of the AI revolution looks more like poorly paid, precarious work for Western firms.

Boris L was working late into the evening in the gloom of a cramped, dusty Internet café in the Ngoa Ékélé district of Cameroon’s capital, his face bathed in the blue glow from a second-hand screen. Outside, Yaoundé’s university district had been plunged into darkness by yet another of the power cuts for which Cameroon’s electricity company, Socadel, is notorious. But here, an old generator rumbled away in the back room and the Internet connection held up. For the past few months, Boris had spent most of his evenings at the café, one of thousands of invisible ‘microworkers’ in Africa who, for a pittance, help keep the wheels of the global AI industry turning.

Boris performed one microtask after another on Remotasks, a platform run by Scale AI, a US company based in San Francisco and valued at $29bn in 2025. These involved locating, outlining and identifying objects in images to train AI systems to recognise them. Pictures of everyday life in the US and Europe scrolled across his screen. He identified pedestrians, cars and road signs, earning a few cents per task. ‘After four hours, I might have made the equivalent of 500 CFA francs,’ he said – less than $1.

Like all the micro-workers I interviewed, Boris asked for his name to be changed, not because he is ashamed of doing work beneath his level of education, but out of fear of losing this meagre but valuable source of income in a country where 65% of the working population experiences some form of underemployment. Thousands of kilometres away, the data he annotates helps train the algorithms for self-driving cars and computer vision models in the global North.

Officialdom, however, pays scant attention to these precarious working conditions. In July 2025 Cameroon’s minister of posts and telecommunications, Minette Libom Li Likeng, officially launched the country’s national AI strategy: its stated ambition is to make Cameroon Africa’s leading hub for this technology by 2040. It (…)

Full article: 2 027 words.

Inès Marie Nga

Inès Marie Nga is a journalism student at the Advanced School of Mass Communication (ESSTIC) in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

(1) See Matt O’Brien, ‘Meta invests in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for “superintelligence” team’, Independent, London, 13 June 2025.

(2) ‘Fifth Cameroon Household Survey (ECAM5): Situation of Household Living Conditions in 2021-2022’, National Institute of Statistics of Cameroon, Yaoundé, May 2024.

(3) Ludovic Amara, ‘Cameroon Unveils AI Plan to Create 12,000 Jobs by 2040’, Business in Cameroon, 11 July 2025.

(4) Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2019.

(5) Article 7 of joint decision no 00000145/Minfi/Minpostel of 25 March 2026, signed by the ministers of finance and posts and telecommunications, fr.scribd.com/.

(6) See Sabine Cessou, ‘Kenya’s growth doesn’t help all Kenyans’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, December 2018.

(7) ‘AI annotation market (2025-2033)’, Grand View Research, San Francisco, October 2025, updated May 2026.