Rungwell won an ethics award in October. Two weeks later, one of its longest-serving quality leads walked out.
Faith Odera joined the data labeling company’s first cohort in Nairobi in 2016 and trained many of the people who now train others. She says she left over a single client project, which she will not name.
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NAIROBI — On the evening of Oct. 13, at a dinner in London, Rungwell was named the winner of an ethical supply chain award in the digital services category of a responsible business competition. The judges praised its openness about pay and attrition, its wellbeing program for people who review disturbing material, and Focus Assurance, the webcam system that scores the attention of labelers working from home.
At the end of the month, Faith Odera left.
Odera joined Rungwell’s first intake at its Nairobi center in 2016. She went on to lead quality on some of the company’s most demanding projects, the kind on which labelers review and tag images for clients training machine-learning systems, and many of the trainers on the floor today learned the work from her. Rungwell marked her departure with a two-sentence note on its website thanking her for ten years of care and rigor.
In an interview at a café in Kilimani, Odera said she resigned because of one project. She would not name the client or describe the material, saying she remained bound by a confidentiality agreement. “I spent ten years telling people that if they did careful work, the work would be worth doing,” she said. “I stopped being able to say it.”
She said she had raised her concerns inside the company before she resigned. Asked whether she had taken them to the board’s ethics committee, which Rungwell’s cohort representatives can ask to review any project, she said she had been told the project had already been reviewed.
Rungwell, a Toronto social enterprise with delivery centers in Nairobi and Manila, says more than 4,000 people have worked for it since 2016. Its labelers are paid by the task. In October its board adopted a new edition of its ethics charter requiring every client to state in writing where the data it sends came from, and an independent review of its wellbeing program is due to report by the end of the year.
In a statement, Rungwell said it was grateful to Odera, that every project is reviewed under its ethics charter, and that it does not discuss work done for clients. It did not answer questions about the project she left over.