In March 2025, a neighbour noticed a foul smell emanating from Ladi Anzaki Olubunmi’s apartment. They called one of her colleagues, who came to check on her. Peering through her window, their eyes confirmed what their noses suspected: Olubunmi was dead.
Two years earlier, Olubunmi had upended her entire life, closing her women’s clothing business in Nigeria, telling her fiancé that their marriage would have to wait, and boarding a plane that would take her more than 5,000 kilometres away from all her friends and family.
Like thousands of Africans from around the continent, the 41-year-old arrived in Kenya full of hope for her new start. She’d landed a new job in Nairobi – nicknamed ‘Silicon Savannah’ due to its tech boom since the late 2000s – as a front desk assistant at Teleperformance, a French multinational tech support company whose clients include Meta, Google and TikTok. The role promised more money than Olubunmi had ever earned before, and she was ecstatic to finally pursue her dreams.
But now, as her colleague and neighbours stood outside her locked apartment, Olubunmi’s swollen, decomposing corpse lay on her bed beside two Bibles.
openDemocracy began investigating the cause of Olubunmi’s death more than a year ago.
We spoke with her relatives, current and former Teleperformance employees, immigration and human rights experts, police officers and government officials in Kenya and Nigeria to discover not just the physical and psychological toll that Kenya’s IT boom imposes on workers, but misleading recruitment practices that, Kenyan officials say, run foul of the country’s immigration laws and, experts warn, may amount to human trafficking.
Our investigation also exposes shortcomings at Teleperformance, specifically how expatriate employees at the company allege that they are kept in a state of permanent anxiety and precarity, isolated and alienated from their families and support systems, overworked and unable to seek help and support. These transnational workers say they are being let down by both local authorities in Kenya and their respective embassies and consulates, who are expected to support their citizens abroad.
Foreign nationals employed in Teleperformance’s Nairobi office told us they were promised jobs that did not exist and brought to Kenya on tourist visas, before being made to work illegally as content moderators for TikTok, the popular social media app. This work, which is typically outsourced to moderators working for third-party companies in the Global South, required them to spend long hours watching graphic footage of murders, rapes and child abuse to remove offensive or harmful content from users’ homepages.
Workers said they were paid less than they’d been promised, on long shifts at all hours of the day, and disciplined if their daily half-hour breaks overran. When they protested for better conditions, Teleperformance made false promises that never came to fruition. When they asked to return home to see loved ones, managers threatened them over their undocumented status, warning that they could be arrested if they tried to leave Kenya. Our findings led a human rights expert to compare Big Tech’s exploitation of workers in the Global South, on whom companies rely to make money, to the European colonialisation of African nations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
openDemocracy reached out to TikTok with our findings, but the company did not wish to provide a statement. According to its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, the company used automated technology to detect and remove 99.3% of the 12 million videos that were taken down across Sub-Saharan Africa during the fourth quarter of 2025. We understand that videos are flagged for review by a content moderator only when the automated system cannot determine if they are in violation of its guidelines.
This is not the first time – or place – that Teleperformance has been accused of exploitation or malpractice of TikTok content moderators.
One of the company’s call centre employees jumped to his death from the third floor of its Cairo office in December 2021, prompting his colleagues to blame stressful conditions in the workplace. In Colombia, a 2023 investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Time magazine found that Teleperformance’s TikTok moderators earned as little as $10 per day for watching videos of murder, suicide and child abuse. In France, the company is facing a lawsuit from investors who say they were misled over content moderators’ working conditions. In Ghana, lawyers representing content moderators employed by Majorel (which Teleperformance acquired in a deal valued at $3.3bn in 2023) are investigating a case against Meta over alleged psychological distress arising from their work.
Some of the workers openDemocracy spoke with had initially been recruited by Majorel and moved over to Teleperformance after the acquisition, while others were recruited post-acquisition. Workers described no improvements in their working conditions when the company changed hands.
A Teleperformance spokesperson told openDemocracy she is “not in a position to comment on specific incidents or individual cases in other countries, as doing so would require detailed context and respect for the privacy of those involved”. She said the company’s global wellness programme extends across all markets it operates in, “including Egypt, the Dominican Republic and Kenya”.
None of these incidents appears to have significantly damaged Teleperformance’s business. In 2025, the most recent year for which its accounts are publicly available, the company reported an annual revenue of $11.77bn, while its founder and former CEO, Daniel Julien, a French national who now lives in Florida, received a base salary of $2.6m, as well as a performance-related bonus of up to $2.6m and share-based remuneration. Julien stepped down as CEO in March 2026.
The company’s reputation appears similarly unaffected. Teleperformance’s website boasts it was named the seventh best employer in the world last year by Great Place to Work, a UK organisation that describes itself as “the global authority on workplace culture”. openDemocracy reached out to Great Place to Work to share our findings, but did not hear back.
Meanwhile, governments continue to welcome tech subcontractors such as Teleperformance with open arms. Rather than protect workers, Kenyan president William Ruto’s government has said it will pass legislation to insulate Big Tech firms such as Meta and TikTok from being drawn into lawsuits filed against outsourcing companies such as Teleperformance. The message behind this legislation is clear: Kenya stands with Big Tech, not its exploited workers.
The hiring process
When Olubunmi arrived at Teleperformance’s office in Nairobi’s Westlands district, she learnt she would not be working on the front desk, but as a content moderator for TikTok, her brother Ishaya Anzaki told openDemocracy. The role required her to spend whole days watching graphic content on the social media platform to filter out videos that breached its rules.
“My sister was self-employed and left Nigeria for a job that she genuinely thought would be good for her. They lied that she would be working as a receptionist,” Anzaki said, when we spoke over the phone.
Four current and former Teleperformance employees told openDemocracy of similar experiences. One showed us a letter in which they were offered a job as a customer service representative, which they said came after they successfully interviewed for that position, then a subsequent letter informing them that they were being “transferred” to content moderation. By this time, the former employee said, they felt unable to quit as they needed the money and feared they would not find a new job quickly. He said he was aware of other colleagues who were recruited in a similar manner, and another former employee told openDemocracy that the same thing happened to him, though we have not been able to review the documents in this instance.
Two other content moderators at the company said that while they had applied for content moderation roles, they knew of colleagues who felt they had been deceived with fake jobs. They believed that Olubunmi’s experience aligned with Teleperformance’s wider recruitment processes at its Nairobi office. openDemocracy obtained documents to establish at least one case of a worker who was transferred from a customer service position to a content moderator position; the worker asked for anonymity and said this transfer was made under pressure.
The practices described by these staff members may meet the internationally accepted definition of human trafficking, according to Miriam Mang’oka, the quality control and research lead at Awareness Against Human Trafficking, a Kenyan non-governmental organisation.
In a written statement to openDemocracy, Teleperformance denied using fake jobs to recruit content moderators, saying that throughout “all stages of the interview and hiring process at TP in Kenya, employees are clearly briefed on their job specifications”. Referring to the claims made by Olubunmi’s brother, it added: “TP in Kenya has never advertised or recruited expatriates for a receptionist position.”
Working without permits
Not only was Olubunmi’s job not what she expected, Anzaki told openDemocracy, but she found out on arrival in Kenya that she was expected to do it illegally.
Foreign nationals employed in Kenya need work permits that cost 500,000 Kenyan shillings ($3,866.90), which is typically paid by the employer. Those awaiting the approval of their permits can obtain a ‘Special Pass’, an interim measure that allows them to work in the country for six months. When Olubumni arrived in Nairobi, she had neither.
By the time her one-year work permit was eventually granted, she had been working in Kenya illegally for six months and when it expired, Teleperformance failed to have it renewed, despite her repeated requests, her brother said.
Records obtained by the Directorate of Immigration Services, and seen by openDemocracy, indicated significant discrepancies with Olubunmi’s residence status. The company also failed to inform the directorate of her demise.
“If you are telling us Olubunmi really died, the company should have notified us of this,” said Wanda Odhiambo, then the director of enforcement and compliance at the directorate, in an interview in January of this year, adding that his office would investigate the matter. Odhiambo has since left the directorate; openDemocracy reached out to ask the organisation whether the investigation is ongoing, but had not heard back at the time of publication.
Ten other current and former Teleperformance content moderators told openDemocracy that they worked at the company illegally, despite repeatedly asking management to secure valid work permits for them. Abubakar Yusuf, a Nigerian national who worked at the company from 2022 to 2024, said he only received his permit 16 months after his start date, while Omar*, another Nigerian former content moderator, said he started work in the Nairobi office in 2022 but only received his work permit in September 2025. Omar left Teleperformance the following month.
“People have worked for almost three years now without permits,” Omar said. openDemocracy also examined worker passports to find a pattern of workers entering Kenya on two-month visitor visas and staying on in the expectation of having their status regularised by Teleperformance.
Immigration services’ Odhiambo told openDemocracy that his office was aware of allegations that Teleperformance’s workers do not have the requisite permits, and that the company has allegedly falsified some permits. He said his office is conducting “an in-depth inquiry” and has asked the company to provide all the necessary information required to enable the directorate to take “a fair administrative action”.
Teleperformance denied that some employees work without permits. It said that it “complies with all immigration requirements and provides all necessary support to expat employees” to receive the correct permits.
“All expatriate applications for work permits are either in process or approved,” said the company’s spokesperson.
Mang’oka, from Awareness Against Human Trafficking, said if the employees’ accounts are accurate, Teleperformance may be in breach of Kenyan law. “The misrepresentation of facts by an employer during the recruitment phase, abuse of vulnerability where foreign individuals are given false job promises and work without permits while depending on their employer for legal status, justify this as a human and labour trafficking case, according to the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act,” she said.
Simon Makworo, an official at the Directorate of Immigration Services, told openDemocracy that the company could be prosecuted if it is found to have “allowed people to work for it without valid documentation. The employer carries the highest responsibility of ensuring that workers have valid permits before engaging them,” he said.
Under this legislation, a person found guilty of recruitment by means of deception for exploitation can be punished with at least 30 years in prison or a fine of at least 30 million Kenyan shillings ($232,000).
But the employees in the country illegally are also at risk of prosecution, Makworo said. “Unfortunately, the workers will be prosecuted for working without valid permits, which the employer is responsible for.”
Even employees who accuse the company of deceptive recruitment will not escape this fate, Makworo added. He explained that a person “cannot say ‘someone brought me into the country and forced me to work’ when you willingly came into the country and accepted the job without a permit”.
As Makworo predicted, vulnerable workers have already suffered as a result of Teleperformance’s practices. Documents obtained by openDemocracy reveal how the company wrote to the Kenyan director of immigration, requesting permission for a Malian national, Daouda Daou, to travel to Kenya for a 90-day training session at its offices in August 2024.
In fact, Daou had been told he was being hired for a full-time role as a content moderator. After a two-week training course, he said he became an undocumented full-time Teleperformance employee for a year, working for the company without a permit up until his contract was terminated in July 2025. Daou is now banned from returning to Kenya after immigration officials tasked with stamping him out of the country realised he had overstayed.
“Being recruited the way I was and then to be banned from returning to Kenya upon termination of employment after working with an expired visa and overstaying left me feeling defeated. And I wasn’t the only one.”
A Teleperformance spokesperson said the company treats any such allegations with utmost seriousness but would not be able to comment on Dauo’s case unless openDemocracy provided specific personal information pertaining to his case.
“Teleperformance’s position is clear: we expect full compliance with applicable immigration and employment requirements, and we do not condone falsification of documents or records. Where questions arise, we cooperate with the relevant authorities through appropriate formal processes,” the spokesperson said.
The work conditions
Content moderators in Teleperformance’s Nairobi office typically work between 45 and 48 hours a week over five days, with shifts set across a “24/7 environment”, according to employment contracts reviewed by openDemocracy. Current and former moderators said they are allowed one timed 30-minute lunch break each day – with disciplinary sanctions such as warnings or even firings for those whose breaks overrun – and one additional weekly 30-minute ‘wellness break’ for “recreational and relaxational purposes”.
Spending long days viewing horrific content took a toll on Olubunmi, her brother said. She told her family her mental health was suffering. This is not unusual for content moderators: A 2025 study of 160 content moderators at an unnamed international company found that just over a quarter “demonstrated moderate to severe psychological distress from viewing toxic online material, while a third reported experiencing low wellbeing”. The study, which was carried out by the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies at Middlesex University in the UK, emphasised the need for adequate psychological care for the moderators to mitigate the impact of their work, finding that support led to improvements in their mental health and wellbeing.
Yet this mentally and emotionally hazardous work isn’t well-compensated. A review of appointment letters reveals content moderators such as Olubunmi are typically paid about 50,000 Kenyan shillings a month, around 30% lower than the country’s average monthly salary, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ 2025 economic survey.
Olubunmi’s family said she told them that Teleperformance also did not provide employees with the necessary mental health support. This was echoed by 10 current and former content moderators at the company, who said that the counselling sessions offered by the firm are neither adequate nor confidential.
One former employee, who spoke to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity as they still worked at Teleperformance at the time of our interview, said management discouraged them from “discussing the nature” of their work with the counsellors, which they felt limited the help they could receive. The employee also said that information confidentially shared with their counsellors would make its way back to their supervisors, who would use this information to mock and humiliate them in front of other colleagues. Five other moderators said they’d had similar experiences. The company rejected these claims, telling openDemocracy its wellness programme prioritises employee welfare.
As her mental health worsened, Olubunmi became increasingly homesick. She asked permission to return to Nigeria for Christmas to see her family at the end of 2024, her brother said. Teleperformance employment contracts seen by openDemocracy say staff are entitled to 21 days of holiday a year, yet her brother said a human resources executive at the firm told Olubunmi that she wouldn’t be able to leave the country due to her status as an undocumented worker, which meant she could be arrested and blacklisted from re-entering the country.
Yusuf, the Nigerian former employee who said he worked at Teleperformance for 16 months without a permit, told openDemocracy that a senior HR officer at the company also told him that he couldn’t visit home as he wouldn’t be able to return to Kenya.
A year before her request to visit home was declined, in November 2023, Olubunmi had rallied her fellow Nigerian colleagues to protest outside Teleperformance’s Nairobi office “against the company’s refusal to provide them with work permits”, according to Yusuf, who took part in the protest. The demonstration came days after two of their Nigerian workmates were arrested and detained for not having valid documentation. Yusuf said the protesters called off their demonstration when a senior HR official promised to secure permits for employees.
Yet by December 2024, Olubunmi still did not have a permit. The HR executive’s warnings succeeded in stopping her from going home. She did not see her family again. Anzaki said his sister’s fiancé broke off their engagement, frustrated that she couldn’t travel to see him. Desperate to leave Nairobi, Olubunmi began shipping her belongings little by little to Nigeria, preparing for the day she would muster up the courage to risk the immigration scrutiny.
A free pass for exploitation
Even in death, Olubunmi’s rights have been restricted by her lack of a work permit.
Had she died in her homeland, Olubunmi would have received the traditional rites of her Hausa people, with her younger relatives singing and dancing around her coffin on the eve of her burial. The next day, she would have been laid to rest in her favourite clothes, with her extended family spending the following week in mourning at her family home.
But because she was in Kenya illegally, albeit through no fault of her own, her body could not easily be repatriated. On 17 April, she was buried unceremoniously, in a public cemetery chosen by Teleperformance, after a funeral attended by her colleagues and her brothers Anzaki and Paul, who had flown to Kenya the day before.
“She fought so hard to go back home and rebuild her life, but Teleperformance wouldn’t renew her work permit,” a coworker told openDemocracy. She should “have spent her last moments surrounded by family, but instead she died alone and far away from home.”
Even now, Olubunmi’s brothers still have questions over her death.
In an email to Anzaki sent the day after Olubunmi’s body was found, Teleperformance’s vice-president of people operations in Kenya and Nigeria, Santanu Basu, said her death had been “sudden” and that preliminary police investigations indicated she’d “died of natural causes”. Yet, more than a year later, the police have still not released her death certificate or the post-mortem results, despite promising that both would be ready within four weeks of her burial. The Kenyan police offered no explanation for the delay when openDemocracy reached out for comment.
When Anzaki went to collect his sister’s pension from the Kenyan National Social Security Fund, he was shocked to discover that the account had allegedly been in arrears for 11 months, likely a consequence of Teleperformance failing to renew her work permit, meaning the company couldn’t legally pay her pension.
“How can someone work for almost a year with tax deductions from her salary, even without a permit, but you keep the money?” Anzaki asked. When he contacted Teleperformance, he was told the company would directly pay him the amount he should have received from Olubunmi's pension entitlement. Anzaki later received 595,947 Kenyan shillings ($4,609.10) from the firm.
openDemocracy found similar alleged discrepancies in the cases of two other former employees. Under Kenyan law, an employer that fails to pay an employee’s pension contribution can be fined 10% of the outstanding arrears. Teleperformance denied failing to do so, telling openDemocracy that it makes the required monthly deposits to the government on behalf of its entire workforce and files the necessary tax returns.
Teleperformance Kenya “went above and beyond in paying Ladi’s benefits directly to her brother from its own account to avoid her brother having to wait on the government process. Teleperformance Kenya replicates the same practice for all existing expats,” according to a statement from the company’s public affairs and advocacy specialist, Edith Ombati.
Kenya is allowing tech giants based in the Global North to get away with exploiting workers in the name of creating jobs, said Angela Chukunzira, who leads technology and ethics at Siasa Place, a Kenyan civic-tech organisation. The invisibility of this type of labour makes it hard to garner public support, but that can be changed, Chukunzira said. She suggested improvements to labour laws can be won by focusing on building empathy among the public, holding the state accountable and strengthening worker power.
“I'm not saying we can solve this problem overnight,” Chukunzira said, “but understanding people’s power is so important because we are the ones who rise against these dominant technology companies and systems. They are few; we are the majority. So, I think building an active citizenship that is conscious of these power dynamics can really push the agenda.”
Reprieve – or lack thereof
Content moderators at Teleperformance have told openDemocracy that they feel they have been failed by both Kenyan and Nigerian government officials.
Omar*, the Nigerian national who has worked at Teleperformance without a permit since 2022, accused Kenyan officials of enabling the company’s illegal labour practices, saying: “The Kenyan government is aware of Teleperformance’s notorious exploitation schemes of trafficking people into the country to work for it without valid documents, but remains unbothered.”
openDemocracy has also obtained a letter that another undocumented Nigerian employee hand-delivered to the Nigerian High Commission in Nairobi eight months before Olubunmi’s death. The letter – which bears the commission’s stamp confirming receipt, dated 19 June 2024 – explains that the workers are employed illegally and asks for the commissioners’ help.
Sonia Odubome, a consular official at the commission, denied this, saying the commission became aware that Nigerians are allegedly working for Teleperformance illegally only after Olubunmi’s death. Like diplomats and bureaucrats openDemocracy has spoken to from the Kenyan government, Odubome sought to place the blame on the workers for being in the country illegally.
“They knowingly came here illegally, signed agreements and kept quiet, enjoying their time in Nairobi until Ladi died and now they are crying that they are being exploited,” said Odubome. “You can’t tell me Teleperformance had a gun on your head and told you not to talk to anybody – please, none of them are children. So why are they now trying to back out of their contracts?”
Mang’oka of Awareness Against Human Trafficking said Odubome’s remarks are an example of the kind of victim-blaming that enables systems designed to exploit vulnerable people, adding that the Nigerian High Commission has a duty to protect its nationals in Kenya from exploitation.
“These workers are in a foreign country, with visitor visas controlled by their employer. If they walk out, they risk immediate deportation or worse, being accused of working illegally,” she said. “Saying things like ‘why can’t they just leave if they are being exploited’ is imagining freedom that doesn’t exist.”
For Mercy Mutemi, the executive director of Oversight Lab, Olubunmi’s death reveals a hollowness at the heart of Kenya’s tech boom.
“Our digital transformation dream is built on a house of cards – the exploitation of workers to [produce] better tech products for Big Tech. Not only is this unsustainable, it is damaging to the Kenyan economy. Economic development does not come from exploitation,” Mutemi said. She added that work like social media moderation leaves Kenyan workforces struggling with mental health issues, unable to participate in the labour market for longer than a few months, alienated from their community and in some cases permanently injured.
“Our people matter, and their rights must be respected at all costs.”
