AI and the African Gig Economy: Assessing the Applicability of Employment Laws for Data Annotators and Platform Workers

  • CIPIT
  • |  
  • August 29, 2025
  • |
  • Reports

Report Summary

This report demonstrates that digital transformation has driven growth in gig work across Africa, specifically in data annotation, a critical aspect in AI development. Through comparative analysis of regulatory frameworks and case studies between the EU and Africa, it reveals the existing poor working conditions and misclassification of the data annotators as independent contractors which leads to lack of social protection. Further, the report shows the challenges and risk faced by African data annotators which extends to gender biases affecting women data annotators disproportionately and in return contributing to biased outputs by the AI systems. The report then proposes evidence based recommendations aimed at ensuring responsible AI development through protecting gig workers and ensuring ethical AI development.

 

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