“£41m of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on a sex chatbot for Kenyan teenagers,” fumed GB News presenter Patrick Christys on X this week as he shared a story from former newspaper the Daily Telegraph.
“It was supposed to promote safe sex, none of the 1,119 referrals it made to a local sexual health clinic led to follow-up action. Money well spent.”
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If £41 million of British taxpayers’ money seems an awful lot to spend on a sex chatbot for Kenyan teenagers, then it may not surprise you to learn it’s a load of balls – as the UK government’s total aid budget for Kenya is £45 million, or a half-decent right back for a Premier League club.
As the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet wrote responding to Christys’s post, “the 41m was for pilot projects across the world – medical drones, tech to find bodies of disappeared people, making semiconductors from rice waste. Serious work by serious people.”
In fact, if Christys had read the article beyond the headline, even the Telegraph was forced to grudgingly concede that the app was “part of a £41m UK aid programme which aims to invest in ‘radical technology solutions’ to issues in the developing world”, although it did get shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel and Reform rentagob Lee Anderson to get furious about a project they’d presumably not previously heard of and use it as an excuse to demand a slashing of the aid budget.
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