For over a decade, Teresios Bundi made a living writing essays for overseas college students looking for a shortcut. His first assignment, a two-page paper on a fruit he had never even heard of, earned him $7. Over the years that followed, Bundi says he churned out more than 2,500 essays covering subjects from engineering to medicine.
How did Kenya become an essay-writing hotspot?
Once cheap high-speed internet reached Kenya around 2009, thousands of well-educated but underemployed graduates found work in the cracks of the global digital economy. Essay writing became one of the most lucrative gigs, with writers charging $40 to $70 per paper.
Researchers say Kenya’s essay-mill industry employed roughly 40,000 people in Nairobi at its peak. Bundi even built a business out of it, setting up a workspace stocked with computers and fast Wi-Fi to keep pace with the demand.
Kenya’s government leaned into the trend too, training graduates to use freelance platforms and later adopting a national plan built around online outsourcing work.
What happened when ChatGPT showed up?
Then OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, and the math changed overnight for students. Suddenly, students didn’t need a human ghostwriter in Nairobi when a free chatbot could spit out an essay in seconds. Demand for essay writers collapsed almost as fast as it had grown, and pay rates followed.
“I never would have expected AI could do this,” Bundi told The New York Times.
The damage wasn’t limited to essay writing. Transcription work and content moderation gigs, once reliable income for Kenyans, have also faded as AI tools took over. Labor activist Frida Mwangi, who used to transcribe interviews for a living, said companies eventually told her to just use AI herself. “My job went completely,” she said.
Oxford researcher Mark Graham, who has studied the global gig economy, put it bluntly: “It’s not just going to be Kenya — it’s going to be everywhere we see a big transformation. AI has come in and taken big chunks of these labor markets.”
Bundi now helps other young Kenyans navigate the digital economy, but he sees his own story as a warning of what’s coming for everyone else. “AI is coming for bankers, for accountants… it’s coming for everybody,” he said.
AI has already changed the job landscape as we know it, and this feels like just the beginning. Kenyans just found that out the hard way, and the rest of us might not be far behind.
