By Nick Markham

Behind every autonomous vehicle, every voice assistant, every (politely) asked LLM prompt is a hidden workforce meticulously labelling data, validating outputs, and training AI to become even more groundbreaking. 

In Africa, digital labelling and microtasking have evolved from a niche income source to a pillar of the continent’s digital economy, employing an estimated 50,000 people currently, with further growth on the cards. This growth hasn’t been painless: traditional outsourcing approaches, often inherited from legacy BPO sectors, struggle to meet rising global AI expectations around quality, ethics, and reliability.

Demand-led, resilient and dignified digital work

In June of 2025, we published our Digital Work Sector Scan, a deep dive exploring how digital labour platforms are evolving across Africa and why some models are proving more resilient than others. That work sharpened our conviction: the future doesn’t belong to open gig markets alone. It belongs to demand-led managed service platforms that embed quality control, accountability, and human oversight into every layer of delivery. 

AfricaAI and Avala stand out as two of the strongest examples of this vision in action, proving that companies with an African footprint can compete, and win, in a crowded global market for ethical, scalable, and resilient digital work. Both AfricaAI and Avala are positioned exactly where we think the future of digital work is strongest: at the intersection of human intelligence and machine learning. They exemplify the kind of earning opportunities that are resilient because they leverage uniquely human skills, judgment, cultural nuance, and ethical discernment, which are supported, rather than displaced, by AI.

AfricaAI and Avala also address quality of work concerns raised around  “AI sweatshops” in Africa—both platforms prioritise dignified, ethical earning opportunities. Their managed service models move beyond traditional outsourcing to offer well-compensated, skill-developing roles. Combined with the demand-led logic, this is how a resilient digital economy can be built—one where workers contribute to global innovation while improving their quality of life

AfricaAI: Ethical data labeling, human first

Africa’s future in AI isn’t just about creating data, it’s about creating careers. From the start, what stood out to us about AfricaAI was its clarity of purpose: to build not just a world-class, ethically managed AI data platform, but a durable pathway for young Africans—especially young African women—to enter the digital economy at scale.

Rather than fragmenting work across anonymous freelancers, AfricaAI has structured teams in physical hubs across Kenya, ensuring that quality, precision, and worker development are managed hand-in-hand. AfricaAI’s managed service model enables it to guarantee quality outcomes beyond task completion. This positions the platform as a trusted extension of its clients’ AI development teams, rather than a dispensable commodity labour pool.

Such an approach guarantees standards in quality of work too—workers aren’t treated as disposable gig labour. AfricaAI recruits and trains dedicated teams, with individuals earning around $250 per month, with structured support for upskilling, career progression, and entry into longer-term digital work pathways.

Gender equity is at the heart of AfricaAI’s model. Women make up 50% of the workforce and are intentionally recruited, trained, and supported to thrive in a sector that is so often underrepresented. For the Jobtech Alliance, this was a strategic fit as building inclusive workforces is central to our mission.

AfricaAI’s recent expansion into legal AI marks a decisive shift into higher-value services, where confidentiality, ethical standards and quality control are critical. This is a platform willing to evolve its value proposition and train its workforce for more complex, higher-margin work. 

As AI capabilities improve, the complexity of data annotation work will inevitably grow. Tasks which required manual human annotation just a few years ago can now be effectively performed by AI agents, so human annotators must continuously stay on the frontier of high-value added work. We explored this shift in more depth in What Digital Jobs Are Left for Africa in an Age of AI?, where we shared why we believe investments like AfricaAI are essential for keeping African workers at the core of the AI economy.

For us, AfricaAI represents more than a strong business. It is a new blueprint for African digital work: human-centred, women-powered, and future-proofed.

Avala: Leading the AI-Ops revolution in autonomous mobility

Avala offered us a very different, but equally compelling vision for African AI annotation. Specialising in advanced tasks like LiDAR and 3D cuboid annotation for the automotive industry, it has cracked the code on turning complex, precision-driven annotation into a genuinely scalable global business. 

At the core is Avala’s own AI Ops engine, built in-house to dispatch and verify tasks across a truly distributed workforce. By integrating task orchestration, quality assurance, and worker development into a unified managed service, just like AfricaAI, Avala moves beyond task outsourcing into long-term partnership with global AI companies. Headquartered in the United States, where much of the demand for high-quality AI training data originates, Avala is well-positioned to build the kinds of “digital trade routes” we wrote about here. This demand-led approach is supported by over 900 annotators in Kenya who currently produce more than one billion annotations daily, each benefiting from a structured training program that converts 70% of trainees directly into long-term workers. 

What sets Avala apart is its commitment to equitable compensation to its coworkers who are able to earn up to 3X more than some publicly known market rates, in addition to a stipend (transport, training, etc) and lunch/refreshments. Further, the platform is actively exploring the integration of ESOPs – a model that remains rare and complex among annotation platforms. While it’s still in its early stages and not yet implemented, it is part of Avala’s strategic efforts to boost worker retention and enhance long-term earning and equitable compensation.

Sectorally, Avala is built to diversify. Autonomous vehicle companies may be Avala’s flagship clients today, but the same 3D annotation engine applies to precision agriculture, smart city mapping, and medical imaging, giving Avala a resilience few sector-tied rivals can match. Owning the AI Ops infrastructure also adds a significant competitive moat, ensuring Avala remains indispensable to clients, even as AI automation reshapes parts of the industry.

For us, Avala represents more than operational excellence. It shows how African platforms can pair advanced technology and equitable employment to create a model for digital work that is both globally competitive and fundamentally human-centered.

A strategic bet on a new digital ecosystem with jobs that AI can’t fully automate

Investing in digital microtasking and annotation isn’t risk free. Recent breakthroughs, such as Meta’s Self-Taught Evaluator model, are already proving that some tasks previously considered human-only could soon become entirely machine-driven. And as AI systems mature, the greatest risk isn’t simply fewer tasks, it’s the relentless push toward price compression and commoditisation that undermines platforms without clear differentiation.

Even as automation accelerates, the structured, managed, quality-assured workflows that platforms like AfricaAI and Avala deliver will remain essential, proving that human-led, precision-managed services still have a critical edge. By embedding human oversight deep into their managed service models, both platforms are positioning their workforces to stay ahead of automation, not be left behind by it.

Beyond immediate job creation, we believe AfricaAI and Avala offer a critical blueprint for a much wider ecosystem of sustainable, resilient digital employment across Africa. They demonstrate two complementary visions of how African talent can power global innovation—not through traditional outsourcing, but through sophisticated human AI collaboration that creates real economic value at home.

These investments aren’t simply wagers on AfricaAI and Avala; they are votes of confidence in Digital Africa, its workforce, its ingenuity, and its right to shape the global AI economy. wagers on AfricaAI and Avala; they are votes of confidence in Digital Africa, its workforce, its ingenuity, and its right to shape the global AI economy.