In June 2011, I wrote that microtasking gave youth a value chain they could use to climb out of poverty. On April 16, 2026, Sama issued redundancy notices to 1,108 Nairobi staff because one client, Meta, ended one engagement.
Fifteen years separate those two sentences. In between, the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Finance Corporation treated impact sourcing as a development strategy. Neither priced the risk that ended it in Nairobi.
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Why Development Organizations Bought In
The pitch was simple, and I bought it too. Hire young people from poor neighborhoods to do digital work for global clients, pay them formal wages, train them, and watch them move up.
In May 2013, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin pledged nearly $100 million to Digital Jobs Africa. The stated goal was one million lives in six countries, partly by growing the impact sourcing sector. At a Technology Salon that July, Rockefeller’s Lillian Chege said some programs had placed 100% of participating youth in formal jobs.
Rockefeller also funded Samasource directly. A World Bank-hosted Solutions for Youth Employment case study lists Rockefeller grants to Samasource in Kenya totaling about $1.6 million across three phases between 2009 and 2015.
In March 2017, Samasource told a New York Technology Salon that its workers saw a fourfold income increase after four years, and that it wanted workers to move on within two years. The same Salon recorded two warnings.
- Samasource said donors had heavily subsidized it for eight years.
- Clients told Banyan Global’s researchers: impact was “the cherry on top.”
The theory was a ladder. Workers would build skills at Sama and leave for better jobs. Their seats would go to the next cohort.
Evidence was Workers Leaving Individually
MIT economists David Atkin and Antoinette Schoar ran the test the sector needed. With Innovations for Poverty Action, they randomized 1,115 Nairobi youth who applied to Sama’s AI 101 training.
Youth who got training plus a job referral to Sama’s delivery center earned 37% more per month than the comparison group, and their unemployment rate was 10 percentage points lower. Women earned 60% more. Youth who got the same training without the referral showed no gain in earnings or employment after 2.5 years.
The full paper puts delivery-center pay at about $301 a month with benefits, roughly 2.5 times Kenya’s formal minimum wage, and average agent tenure at 25 months in 2020.
Participants who worked at the delivery center and then left still reported higher earnings at endline, and the authors read that as experience with value elsewhere. That comparison is not randomized, because the people who leave Sama are not a random draw. It is still the best evidence that the ladder worked for some climbers.
Those exits happened one worker at a time, in a study period when a large client contract had Sama hiring. Nobody measured what happens when 1,108 workers with the same skills hit the Nairobi job market in the same month, after the buyer of their work took it elsewhere.
Sama’s own alumni data cannot fill that gap. ImpactMatters audited Samasource’s evidence in 2016 and found that only 32% of sampled alumni completed the company’s follow-up survey. The Solutions for Youth Employment case study rests its claim that 85% of former workers kept working or studying on that same survey design.
One Client Shaped Sama for Nine Years
Meta first contracted Sama in 2017 for data labelling, with about 1,500 staff on the work. When Daniel Motaung led an attempt to unionize Sama’s Facebook moderators in 2019, TIME reported his dismissal letter said his actions put Sama’s relationship with Facebook at great risk. Sama says it fired Motaung for bullying and coercing colleagues.
In early 2022, Sama dropped its OpenAI work. TIME reported that most of the roughly three dozen workers on it moved to lower-paying workstreams, and others lost their jobs. In January 2023, Sama exited content moderation and cut about 200 jobs, roughly 3% of staff, while keeping the Meta labelling work.
In April 2026, Meta ended that work too. Meta told the BBC it ended the relationship because Sama did not meet its standards. Sama rejects that.
Naftali Wambalo of the Africa Tech Workers Movement told the BBC he believes Meta acted after workers told Swedish reporters they had reviewed intimate footage from Meta’s smart glasses. Mercy Mutemi, the lawyer for former moderators suing Meta and Sama, said Kenya should hear Meta’s statement as a warning: “This is a very flimsy foundation to build your entire industry on.”
Sama’s Kenya country lead, Annepeace Alwala, told TechCabal that client programs evolve as a standard feature of the industry. She is right, and the sector sold that feature. Banyan Global’s 2017 report on microwork and impact sourcing, lists helping companies absorb demand fluctuations among impact sourcing’s benefits to clients. The flexibility clients bought was the volatility workers carried.
Sama’s workers knew it.
In 2023, Oxford Internet Institute researchers working with Fairwork conducted 46 interviews at Sama and found many workers on one-month or three-month contracts. One worker told them complaints about fatigue were met with a reminder that a client exit would mean unemployment.
Sama’s fix tied worker contracts to client contracts: a default of 12 months, or the length of the client contract when the client has no termination rights, unless Sama expects that contract to end early. Fairwork scored Sama 5 out of 10 and noted that its ethical reputation helped it win investment and clients.
Mophat Okinyi calls this the new face of worker exploitation in 2025. I think the problem is duller and easier to fix. Nobody with money in the deal measured what happens when a core client exits and mass layoffs ensue.
IFC Was Ready to Call It Development
In December 2022, IFC disclosed a proposed investment of up to $10 million in Sama to expand in Uganda. Up to $5 million was to come from a subordinated co-investment through the IDA20 Private Sector Window Blended Finance Facility, which IFC estimated at an 8.77% subsidy. IFC’s development case promised improved livelihoods and skills upgrading for women and disadvantaged youth.
IFC never put the money in, and it has not said why.
The proposal still matters, because it shows how the sector’s most sophisticated development investor looked at Sama. IFC’s environmental and social review, counted 4,731 Sama staff, about 78% of them in Kenya, and listed content moderation among Sama’s operations.
IFC staff visited Sama sites in Kampala, Gulu, and Nairobi in September 2022, four months after Motaung filed a lawsuit alleging forced labor and inadequate psychosocial support. The review covers fire detection, electrical fire risk, evacuation signage, and workstation equipment.
A text search found no mention of the lawsuit, a court, trauma, psychosocial support, a union, Meta, or client concentration. It describes Sama’s strategy as serving large steady clients.
IFC did see one risk clearly.
Its draft action plan required Sama to update its redundancy procedures with an analysis of alternatives to retrenchment and a plan that engages workers before and during layoffs. The development bank knew the core client exit scenario needed a plan.
Formal Employment is a Benefit
J-PAL’s comparison group faced 30% unemployment, and informal jobs held 83.6% of Kenyan employment in 2018, per the same J-PAL summary.
The 1,108 workers got notices under Section 40 of Kenya’s Employment Act, a protection an informal job would not have given them. And the J-PAL paper shows other former Sama workers doing better than a comparison group.
Every BPO firm also carries client concentration risk. But ordinary BPO firms did not ask donors and development banks for concessional capital on a promise of poverty exit and skills transfer. Impact sourcing did. The subsidy bought a claim that no published evidence tests against a mass layoff.
Sama Should Publish the Exit
In late 2023, Sama told Fairwork it would research the job market for its employees and define pathways beyond the firm. It has not published that research. Its 2024 impact report lists an alumni community and career fairs, and claims a 148% average income lift three years after joining Sama, with no methodology.
Sama now holds the cleanest test impact sourcing will ever get: 1,108 workers who left on the same date from the same city. Track them for a year, and publish where they landed and what they earn.
- If the ladder holds under a mass layoff, Sama will own the strongest evidence the sector has ever produced.
- If it fails, every funder weighing the next impact sourcing deal needs to know.
Sama promised to study when staff exit. It should start with the 1,108.
