[Kictanet] Uganda: Country Soon to Jump Onto the Outsourcing Bandwagon

[Dorcas Muthoni]

Uganda: Country Soon to Jump Onto the Outsourcing Bandwagon

East African Business Week (Kampala)
April 24, 2006

http://allafrica.com/stories/200604240920.html

Edwin Nshuti--Kampala

Since independence, Uganda has been actively engaged in the outsourcing
industry, offshoring the refining and value-addition processes of most
of her raw materials to Europe and America - to her disadvantage.

This sad spectacle is, however, set to change and the country is set to
realise its first positive benefits out of outsourcing.

InterGlobal Services (IGS), a U.S. call centre operator in conjunction
with the Busoga Kingdom are in the final stages of setting up a
150-seater world-class call centre in Jinja, 80 kilometres east of
Kampala.

"We are about one month behind schedule," the prime minister of Busoga
Kingdom, Mr. Martin Musumba revealed to Business Week, "but it should
be up and running by the end of May."

The call centre will employ 450 operators, working 3 shifts everyday,
and 7 days a week earning an estimated salary of about US$1,000 every
month.

However, the groundwork for equipping the population to work in the
intricate offshoring industry had started earlier.

The government through the ministry of education entered into an
agreement with Global Management Consortium-Trade Information Network
(GMC-TIN) and Serebra Learning Corporation (Canada) to provide low cost
and affordable education in ICT, professional development courses
including call technologies and call centre management through a
programme known as EasyLearning.

This programme will, according to Mr. Godfrey Seruwagi, the
EasyLearning national project coordinator, go a long way in "bridging
the digital divide through access to ICT education and provide
Ugandan's with outsourcing job opportunities."

Serebra, which owns the courseware has over 3,000 courses in its
library but only 400 of those have been negotiated into EasyLearning
and are accessible at a cost of Ush12,000 (US$6) per course.

Ms. Rossette Serwanga, the EasyLearning programme manager says that
since its launch on January 17, 2006, over 600 people have sat and
passed the online courses. Busoga Kingdom set up an e-Learning centre
in Jinja called IT Synergies, where they have been training the future
call centre operators and managers and are now set to run the first
outsourcing centre in the country.

Outsourcing is the process through which one company hands over part of
its work to another company, making it responsible for the design and
implementation of the business process under strict guidelines
regarding requirements and specifications from the outsourcing company.

In this age of globalisation, in a world where Information Technology
(IT) has become the backbone of business, very many huge companies like
IBM, General Electric, Microsoft, etc are beginning to move some of
their vital but peripheral operations like low-end software development
and help-desk services to low cost labour countries.

This phenomenon has mainly emerged due to stringent labour laws in
developed countries and the need to cut costs to remain competitive.

Over the last decade, India has been the leading offshore destination
for global IT and Business Process Offshoring (BPO) industries because
of its huge pool of highly educated, English speaking workers who are
willing to work for just a fraction of what their counterparts in
Europe are paid.

These industries have played a major role in transforming India from a
slow-growth economy with recurring balance of payments problems to a
fast-growth economy generating ample foreign exchange surpluses.

India's offshoring industry earns foreign exchange revenue of about
US$6billion and employs about 350,000 people.

However, India could soon lose its leading position as the world's
'back office.'

According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, a U.S.
consultancy firm and the India IT body Nasscom, India's outsourcing
industry will face a short fall of 500,000 workers in the next few
years.

With Indian universities churning out 3.6million graduates every year,
how can it be short of workers?

The problem in India, according to experts, has always been the quality
of its workforce, not quantity.

US companies that operate call centres in India have continually
complained the call centre agents' English accent being heavily
influenced by their mother tongues. This has been India's biggest
setback.

Fluency in English aside, employers also complain that the majority of
India's IT graduates lacked computer skills, inability to reason
clearly and think critically





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