Rungwell today opened its first delivery centre, on the third floor of Kilele Court in Kilimani, Nairobi. Sixty labellers began work this morning after three weeks of paid training in image annotation, data entry quality and workplace skills.
The first cohort was recruited with three community youth employment programs in Kibera, Kawangware and Mathare. Every member of the cohort is between 19 and 27 years old; 34 of the 60 are women; and 47 had no formal employment in the year before they applied.
The centre’s first two clients, an agricultural imaging company in Europe and a document-processing firm in Canada, have contracted for work through the end of the year. Labellers are employed by Rungwell Kenya Limited on fixed-term contracts with health cover, paid leave and statutory contributions from their first day.
“We did not want to build a call centre with a charity sticker on it,” said Joseph Githinji, Rungwell’s co-founder and director for Kenya. “We wanted a workplace that a young person in Kawangware would be proud to walk into, and that a client in Munich would trust with its data. Those turn out to be the same place.”
“The work machine learning needs is careful, human work,” said Nadine Arsenault, co-founder and Executive Director. “It is going to be done somewhere, by someone. We think it should be done by people who are paid properly and trained to go further, and that the money it earns should go back into them.”