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| Growth: Gilda Odera, managing director of the Skyweb-Evans call center in Nairobi, Kenya, says that the center will soon expand
its capacity threefold. Rob Crilly |
World's next outsourcing hub: Kenya?
The Kenyan government is pumping millions of dollars into improving the nation's outdated telecom industry.
By Rob Crilly | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 21, 2007 edition
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Nairobi, Kenya - The six clocks on the wall track time zones from the US Pacific seaboard, through the Midwest and across the Atlantic to Britain. Twenty or so computers sit idle, headsets resting on mouse pads waiting for the next shift of call center workers.
It could be a phone bank anywhere in the world but for the clock on the far right labeled "Kenya."
"People say to me, 'Wow, this is happening in Kenya? We only think of you for athletics and wildlife,' " says Gilda Odera, managing director of Skyweb-Evans in the heart of the capital, Nairobi. "But people are getting really interested in us."
Her call center and a dozen others are seeds of an industry that the government hopes will put the East African country on equal terms with India as an outsourcing destination.
The government is pumping millions of dollars into improving the country's outdated telecom system in an effort to capitalize on Kenya's large pool of English-speaking graduates.
Eventually it wants Kenya to be as well-known for its call centers as its lions, tea, and coffee.
But for now, companies like Skyweb-Evans are limited by shoddy infrastructure and ferociously expensive internet connections.
Ms. Odera employs more than 40 people in two shifts. They mostly dial Canada to collect market research and polling data, but she says it can be a struggle to break even.
"Sometimes we have clients that need more than 20 seats but, because we haven't been able to ramp up, we haven't been able to take the work, even though it was attractive work," says Odera.
That is all about to change. In February, her company will open a 75-seat call center, expanding capacity more than threefold.
New fiber-optic cable
Last week, the Kenyan government signed an agreement with French-US telecom group Alcatel-Lucent for a fiber-optic cable linking the Kenyan port of Mombasa with the United Arab Emirates.
More important, it will connect East Africa to the rest of the world's Internet capacity and replace the slow and costly satellite links that act as a brake on the country's fast developing industry in business process outsourcing (BPO).
At the signing, Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communications, said the connection would allow more ordinary Kenyans to surf the Internet. But the real driving force behind the deal, he said, was the potential for creating jobs in call centers and the rest of the outsourcing industry.
"A year ago we started pushing ourselves as a BPO center," he said. "But if you look at the price and compare it with our competition, we are simply not competitive."
Typical monthly charges are $7,500 for one megabyte of bandwidth. Elsewhere in the world it costs no more than $400.
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