A liability question dressed as a business-law update
When Kenya's National Assembly resumed debate on the Business Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024 on July 28, 2026, the headline framing was banking capital requirements and standards accreditation. But the loudest objections have come from a different corner: the Kenya Union of Gig Workers (KUGWO) and the Africa Tech Workers Movement (ATWM), who say Clauses 10 through 12 quietly reroute legal liability away from the multinational platforms and business-process-outsourcing (BPO) clients that gig and digital workers actually work for (The Standard).
The mechanism, as described by petitioners in a related court case, is structural rather than a blanket immunity clause: Clause 10 establishes that when a tech company engages workers through a BPO intermediary, it is the BPO — not the tech company whose app, product, or output the worker is actually generating — that is liable for claims raised by tech workers, "regardless of whether another party (the tech company) was responsible" (Business Daily Africa). For a smaller, thinly capitalized local outsourcing firm, that liability can be functionally worthless to a worker seeking redress — while the multinational client, which set the wages, tools, and output targets, is legally out of the room.
The steelman: Kenya is competing for BPO investment
The case for the bill is not absurd. Kenya's BPO and IT-enabled services sector is one of the government's flagship job-creation bets, and Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot has said the changes were requested by tech companies specifically "to keep Kenya competitive in the global market for tech jobs" (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre). Multinational platforms weighing where to site a content-moderation hub or a ride-hailing operations center do factor in litigation exposure, and a jurisdiction seen as an easy venue for suits against foreign parents — however meritorious those suits might be — can lose deals to Manila, Cairo, or Kigali. Predictable, contained liability is a legitimate input into that calculus, and a government trying to grow formal-sector jobs is not wrong to weigh it.
Why the fix goes too far
The problem is that Clauses 10-12 don't just cap or channel liability — critics argue they sever it from the party actually directing the work, which is a different thing from proportionate regulation. The bill's timing makes the connection explicit: petitioners frame it as a direct response to the litigation Meta and its former subcontractor Sama have faced in Kenyan courts since 2022, when content moderator Daniel Motaung sued alleging human trafficking and unsafe working conditions, saying he was paid roughly $2.20 an hour to review posts including graphic violence and child abuse (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre). Kenyan courts have since held that Meta can be sued locally despite the intermediary structure. A bill that arrives after that ruling and hands the intermediary sole liability going forward looks less like general business-law modernization and more like a bespoke fix for one class of defendant.
The same asymmetry shows up on the ride-hailing side, without any BPO structure at all. ATWM chairperson Wycliffe Alutalala, who has driven for Uber in Nairobi for 11 years, says the company has never remitted his Social Health Authority or National Social Security Fund contributions — the 12% mandatory retirement contribution (split 6% employer, 6% employee) that Kenya's NSSF Act, 2013 requires for recognized employees (NSSF Kenya) — because he is classified as an independent contractor rather than an employee (The Standard). KUGWO chairperson Frida Mwangi says the bill leaves that classification question untouched while adding new procedural friction for BPO workers, calling it "a lot of loopholes." Alutalala's summary is blunter: "anytime the government tries to come up with a regulation, it is always for the investors, it has nothing to do with the workers."
Process, not just substance, is under challenge
Thirty-six workers, led by the advocacy group Oversight Lab, tried to stop the bill in June, arguing the Senate passed its version without genuine public participation — no memoranda were meaningfully considered, and no participation report was tabled, as Kenya's constitution requires for legislation of this kind. The High Court declined to intervene, ruling the challenge premature since a bill not yet enacted is not law capable of being struck down (The Standard). That procedural door remains open once the bill clears the National Assembly, which is precisely why the current, still-amendable Second Reading stage — where the bill sits as of the Assembly's Finance and National Planning Committee report (Parliament of Kenya) — is the more consequential fight.
The proportionate fix
Kenya doesn't need to choose between attracting BPO investment and protecting the workers who staff it. The narrow fix is to decouple the two questions the bill currently conflates: procedural venue for claims (where a worker files, which is a legitimate thing to streamline) versus who bears ultimate liability (which should track who actually directs the work and captures its value). Joint-and-several liability between BPO intermediaries and their multinational clients — standard in several EU platform-work frameworks — would preserve Kenya's pitch to investors while closing the accountability gap unions are pointing at. The National Assembly has the bill in front of it now; narrowing Clauses 10-12 to fix venue without erasing liability is a smaller lift than the current standoff suggests.