For more than a decade, Kenya served as a hub for a shadowy digital industry: writing academic papers for students abroad. Thousands of educated, English-speaking young Kenyans with access to reliable internet earned money by producing essays, assignments, and term papers for clients in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere.
According to an investigation by The New York Times, at the industry's peak at least 40,000 people in Nairobi alone were employed writing papers for others. The sector flourished thanks to a large population of university-educated English speakers, relatively low living costs, and the spread of affordable, fast internet. For many participants, the income far exceeded what local employment could offer.
Teresios Bundi, one of the writers profiled in the investigation, moved to Nairobi in 2011 to attend university. After completing a degree in public health, he chose to write academic papers rather than pursue work in his professional field. He reported charging between $40 and $70 per assignment, completing more than 2,500 papers over approximately 12 years, and building a small business around the service.
His first job, taken on a friend's suggestion while he was still a student, paid $7 for three hours of work: a two-page paper on the health benefits of a fruit he had never encountered, for a client he knew nothing about. Some students handed over their university login credentials so that he could keep up with their coursework directly. At times he completed three assignments in a day.
After graduating in 2015, Bundi never took a job in public health. He rented a house near a university, equipped it with desks, fast internet and mattresses, and hired students who wrote between classes and slept when they could not. The work paid at least five times what a public health position would have. His parents, coffee farmers, had taken out a loan to buy him a laptop. In Nairobi the money was visible in new cars, current-model phones and nights out.
The industry was never officially sanctioned, but it grew alongside a government strategy that pointed in the same direction. Cheap high-speed internet reached Kenya around 2009, and the state came to regard online outsourcing as a route out of unemployment: transcription, data entry, graphic design, web development and basic coding. In 2016 the government began training university graduates to work on freelance platforms. In 2022 it adopted a ten-year National Digital Masterplan that leaned further into outsourcing and gig work.
The underlying problem was real. More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year. Roughly 80 percent of employment in the country is informal, youth unemployment runs above 25 percent, and around 40 percent of the population of 54 million lives in poverty. Scarce opportunity has helped fuel a youth protest movement.
The masterplan was adopted the same year OpenAI released ChatGPT.
The effect on the essay trade was rapid. Students who had previously paid freelancers could now generate a paper themselves, instantly and at no cost. Demand did not migrate to a cheaper supplier; it disappeared. Within roughly two years of the chatbot's release in late 2022, the industry had shrunk to almost nothing.
For the writers who remain, monthly earnings have fallen from a range of about $900 to $1,200 to somewhere between $500 and $800, according to the investigation. One operator who had employed around 100 writers has closed.
The collapse was not the first of its kind in Kenya, only the loudest. Frida Mwangi turned to transcription work in 2015 while raising four children, handling recorded interviews and medical files. From 2017 the assignments began thinning out, as transcription became one of the earliest tasks software could handle. Her rates fell. Employers eventually instructed her to run audio through automated tools and correct the output, which she found slower than transcribing from scratch, because the software mangled medical terminology. The work disappeared anyway. She now campaigns on behalf of gig workers.
Other parts of Kenya's outsourcing economy have contracted for their own reasons. Sama, which employed Kenyans to moderate content for Meta, scaled back after scrutiny of pay and working conditions. Scale AI discontinued some of its Kenyan operations.
There is evidence that the displacement has further to run. An index maintained by Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety measures the share of online freelance tasks that leading models can complete across categories including product design and data analysis. Last October the figure stood at 2.5 percent. By July it had reached 16 percent.
Mark Graham, an Oxford professor who studies the global gig economy, told the Times that AI has already absorbed substantial portions of these labor markets, and that Kenya will not be the last place where it happens.
What survives of the essay trade has changed shape. The remaining work is largely editing AI-generated papers so that they will not be flagged by the detection software universities now deploy, a practice writers refer to as humanising. One writer, who gave the Times only her first name out of concern for her future employment, said business remains as strong as ever. She drafts with AI and rewrites by hand, avoiding the commercial tools marketed for disguising machine-written text. In her account, the students who get caught are the ones without writing experience of their own.
The detection tools are themselves unreliable, and have flagged writing produced by humans. On the demand side, a committee at MIT concluded in August that AI can complete nearly any written assignment in the institution's undergraduate curriculum, which is a large part of why no one needs to commission a stranger in Nairobi.
Bundi, now 34, closed his business and struggled for a time to find a direction. He works for a German government development organisation, helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. He says he misses the deadlines and the subjects he was forced to learn from nothing, and describes the years of writing as a parallel education. His own calculation is narrower: the classmates who stayed in public health after 2015 have advanced through the ranks, and if he returned now he would start at entry level under someone who graduated last year.
He put the broader point to the Times in terms that extend well beyond essay mills, listing bankers, accountants, engineers and architects among those he expects to face the same displacement. "It's coming for everybody," he said.
The pattern is visible elsewhere in the same period. Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the marketplace it built two decades ago to pay people small sums for tasks software could not yet perform, at the end of September. Uber has withdrawn from Nigeria and Uganda while cutting roughly a tenth of its workforce.
The Kenyan government has not changed course. John Tanui, the principal secretary at the ministry responsible, told the Times that he stands by the country's potential as an outsourcing hub and the opportunities it could open for young people.
