A Ghanaian PhD student at Texas Tech University, Mr Jeffery Acheampong Adu, has called for stronger legal and policy protections for workers whose labour supports the development of artificial intelligence systems.
Mr Adu presented his study at the 2026 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The study, titled “Data Workers in the AI Supply Chain: An Exploratory Study of the Legal and Policy Protections Governing Digital Labour,” examines how AI data workers are recognised and protected across global, African regional, and Ugandan legal and policy frameworks.
The research challenges the common perception of AI as fully automated by highlighting the human labour involved in data annotation, content moderation, data cleaning, verification, and other tasks that make AI systems possible.
According to the study, existing scholarship has made significant progress in exposing the hidden labour behind AI. However, less attention has been given to the legal and policy provisions established by global, regional, and national institutions to protect these workers, and to whether gaps remain in existing frameworks.
Using Uganda as a case study, Adu analysed major human-rights, labour, data-protection, cybersecurity, and digital-development policies.
The findings show that AI data workers are not explicitly recognized as a distinct legal category. Instead, they are protected indirectly as persons, employees, workers, citizens, and data subjects.
The study also found that Uganda’s Employment Act offers important labor protections, but access to those protections may depend on whether a worker is formally recognized as an employee. This creates uncertainty for freelancers, outsourced workers, subcontractors, and platform workers.
Adu argues that AI governance should move beyond protecting data, systems, and innovation to also protect the people behind AI. He calls for clearer recognition of AI data work as labor and stronger protections relating to fair pay, safe working conditions, mental-health support, worker privacy, collective voice, and access to legal remedies.
The study contributes to ongoing debates about AI governance in Africa by showing that the challenge is not simply the absence of legal protections, but the fragmented and uneven way existing protections apply to emerging forms of digital labor.
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