Topic

The documentary you will be helping conceptualize, shoot and edit will be about the impact of digital media and the gig economy in Kenya. In short, digital technologies and digital media have transformed many aspects of everyday life in Kenya, as well as many other African countries. There are great new opportunities for people to work, mobile phones have made banking very accessible, and new digital-only media outlets are helping uncover corruption cases. At the same time, some of these technologies are creating new problems such as low-paying labor, and increasing tech-literacy gaps. With this documentary, we want to explore some of the good things that came out of widespread use of digital tools and technology in Kenya, but also present some of the negative consequences.

The exact themes and stories covered in the film will be determined during the workshops that you will be required to attend from December 16 to December 19, but here are some ideas that we will ask you to explore as you begin researching about the topic.

Content moderators

1) Large social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have been using highly qualified and tech-savvy Kenyans to monitor, flag and remove content that is not allowed on their platforms. Workers are regularly exposed to violent and pornographic images, which has a profound impact on their mental health. These are some interesting resources you might want to read:

• Gadgets Africa: an opinion piece written by a Kenyan journalist about the consequences of having Facebook moderators in Kenya
• The Cleaners: a film about content moderators broadcast on PBS last year
• The Washington Post: an overview of the mental health impact on content moderators

Global gig economy

2) Kenya has one of the fastest internet connections in Africa. It also has lots of young university graduates that have great IT skills and speak perfect English. This combination of skills makes Kenyan workers, whose salaries are much lower than those in the US or UK, highly sought after. More and more people are using platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr or Outsourcely to hire these workers in Kenya for small tasks (proofreading, transcribing, copy-writing). While this is a great source of income for many of these young Kenyans, it creates a workforce with no benefits, unstable jobs and long working hours. This is what the gig economy is all about in Kenya. Here are some resources on the topic:

• The Economist: a short package about the “global gig economy” in Kenya.
  
• Quartz: how AirBnB, Uber and other international companies are transforming some African cities.
  
• Vice: some refer to the companies that employ these “global gig economy” workers as “digital sweatshops”.
  

Silicon Savannah

3) Of all countries in East Africa, Kenya (and to some extent Ethiopia) is at the forefront of IT innovation. The government has spent lots of money in creating IT hubs, and many small African start-ups have their headquarters located in Nairobi (and increasingly in Mombasa). Some even refer to Kenya as the “Silicon Savannah”. Despite all of this innovation and creativity, the digital economy is still only helping a very small number of Kenyans. Here are some resources to learn more about this.

• Wired: a good overview of how Nairobi is becoming an innovation hub
• The Economist: an article written way before Apple Pay was around, on why Kenya leads in mobile banking.
• Al Jazeera: one sector where a lot of innovation is happening in Kenya is the agriculture sector.

“Fake news”

4) While most of us began talking about “fake news” during the 2016 US presidential campaign, disinformation had been around on social media a while in other countries. One of them is Kenya. The spread of politically-motivate inaccurate information brought violence between opposing parties in some parts of the country after the 2007 and 2017 elections. The widespread problem of disinformation in Kenya has been talked about quite often in the media. Here are some resources for you to start reading:

• Atlantic Council: an overview of how prevalent the problem of politically-motivated disinformation is in Kenya
• Vice: the “epidemic” of “fake news” in Kenya, and how a foreign company was to blame
• PRI: how political rivals turned to violence, and how that relates to Kenya’s political culture

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