Sama, the Nairobi-based outsourcing firm that labels data for some of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence models, is making 1,108 employees redundant after Meta, one of its biggest clients, formally ended a major engagement at its Kenya office.
The formal notice of redundancy was issued on 16 April 2026, the company confirmed in a media release. Sama said it had engaged with Meta to try to save the work, but those efforts “have not been successful.” The engagement is scheduled to end later this month.
“As is standard in our industry, client programs evolve, and we work closely with our partners to manage these transitions responsibly,” said Annepeace Alwala, Sama’s Country Lead and Vice President for Global Delivery. “Our immediate priority is supporting our employees through this change and ensuring continuity across our broader operations.”
The redundancy process has been filed under Section 40 of Kenya’s Employment Act 2007, which sets out the legal steps an employer must follow when cutting jobs. Those steps include written notice to affected staff, the labour office, and the relevant trade union, as well as severance pay of at least 15 days for every year worked.
What Sama actually does in Nairobi
Sama describes itself as a data annotation company. In plain terms, that means its workers label massive volumes of images, video, and text so that machine learning engineers can train AI models. If you have ever used an AI model that recognises a stop sign, identifies a tumour, or writes a sentence that sounds almost human, there is a real chance someone in Nairobi spent hours tagging the training data that made that possible.
Sama is a certified B-Corp, headquartered in San Francisco, with its largest delivery centre along Mombasa Road in Nairobi. It says that 25% of Fortune 50 companies, including GM, Ford, Microsoft, and Google, use its services.
A complicated history with Meta
Meta and Sama’s relationship has never been simple. Sama started working with Meta in 2017 as a data labelling partner. By 2019, its Nairobi office had also become Meta’s content moderation hub for the entire African region, reviewing some of the most graphic material on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
That content moderation arrangement ended in 2023, after a wave of lawsuits, whistleblowing, and allegations of poor working conditions, mental health harm, and union busting. The ensuing case, brought by 184 former moderators, is still active in Kenya’s Employment and Labour Relations Court, with a ruling postponed again in February this year.
When Sama exited content moderation, it leaned fully into data annotation. That is the business that Meta has now walked away from.
The data annotation work itself has not been without scrutiny. In March, tech-ish.com reported on a Swedish investigation that found Sama annotators in Nairobi were manually reviewing intimate footage captured by Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, including bathroom visits, sexual content, and people undressing without realising the glasses were still recording. Neither Sama nor Meta has said whether that specific workstream is the one ending this month, but the release does confirm “a significant number” of the 1,108 affected staff were on the terminated stream.
What this means for Silicon Savannah
For Kenya, 1,108 jobs is the single largest round of tech-sector redundancies at Sama’s Nairobi hub to date. It is more than four times the 2023 content moderation layoff.
Sama has long been held up as proof that Kenya can build middle-class digital jobs for young people. A J-PAL evaluation found SamaDC wages averaged about 2.5 times the formal minimum wage, with benefits including healthcare, pension, and meal subsidies. The comparison group in that study earned a monthly average of KES 13,440.
Losing more than a thousand such positions on the decision of a single US client raises hard questions. How reliant is Kenya’s BPO sector on one or two big tech buyers? What happens to the workers? And what does Section 40 compliance actually look like this time, given the court battles still unresolved from last time?
It also raises questions about Sama’s migrant workforce. During the Meta content moderation era, a significant portion of Sama’s Nairobi staff were non-Kenyans on work permits tied to the engagement. Whether the 1,108 affected today include a similar share of migrants is not stated in the release, but it is a question worth asking given Sama’s history.
Sama says it is supporting staff “with care and respect”, that teams have had access to living wages, full medical benefits, and on-site counselling by licensed practitioners, and that it will continue its core work for other clients.
Expect the questions to keep coming. For Meta: is the work moving to automation, to another provider, or to another country, as its content moderation reportedly did when it quietly relocated to Accra via Teleperformance? For Sama: who is big enough to replace Meta in its revenue mix? And for Kenya: can Silicon Savannah survive the same pattern of mass hiring and mass redundancy for a third time?
