Sentiment analysis focuses on the automatic detection and classification of opinions expressed in texts. Emojis can be used to determine the sentiment polarities of the texts (i.e. positive, negative, or neutral). Several studies demonstrated how sentiment analysis is accurate when emojis are used (Kaity and Balakrishnan, 2020). While they have used emojis as features to improve the performance of sentiment analysis systems, in this paper we analyse the use of emojis to reduce the manual effort inlabelling text for training those systems. Furthermore, we investigate the manual effort reduction in the sentiment labelling process with the help of sentiment-bearing words as well as the combination of sentiment-bearing words and emojis. In addition to English, we evaluated the approaches with the low-resource African languages Sepedi, Setswana, and Sesotho. The combination of emojis and words sentiment lexicon shows better performance compared to emojis-only lexicons and words-based lexicons. Our results show that our emoji sentiment lexicon approach is effective, with an accuracy of 75% more than other sentiment lexicon approaches, which have an average accuracy of 69.1%. Furthermore, our distant supervision method obtained an accuracy of 76%. We anticipate that only 24% of the tweets will need to be changed as a result of our annotation strategies