Kenyan Students on African Outsourcing

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 30 - Susan Mina, a Kenyan who has never stepped foot out of Africa, speaks English like the haughtiest of Britons. She can also put on a fair imitation of an American accent by swallowing all her words. Still, every once in a while, some Swahili slips out of her and that is not at all helpful as she tries to enhance Africa's role in the global explosion of outsourcing. It happened the other day when she was trying to get a British man to sign up for a new cellular telephone service. He was in his home, minding his own business. 70-646 She sat near the Nairobi airport, doing her business as a sales agent for KenCall, Kenya's first international call center. The man's accent - she pegged it as Irish - was unintelligible to her. "Pole sana?" she blurted out, which is what one says in Swahili instead of "Huh?"
Controlling one's Swahili is just one of the challenges that Kenyans are facing as they play catch-up in an industry that India and other countries have turned into major job generators.
Kenya's regular phone lines are so abysmal that the founders of KenCall had to go through the cumbersome process of getting government approval to use a costly satellite hookup. Even more dollars were burned on an elaborate generator system aimed at keeping KenCall's computer screens running during Nairobi's frequent power failures. 70-536 Although just a tiny entrant in the call-center market, KenCall has enough clients to keep 200 telephone operators busy. Some of the Kenyan sales agents dial up Britons and urge them to save money on their cellular phones. Others dial up Americans and ask if they are interested in refinancing their home mortgages. Without knowing it, some Americans even dial up Kenya, responding to advertisements offering low-income grants or job assistance.After looking on for years as Asia cashed in on the outsourcing boom, Africa is now aggressively seeking its piece of the action.
Datamonitor, a consulting firm that follows outsourcing, estimates that there are 54,000 call-center jobs in the most advanced countries in Africa, out of a total of 6 million such jobs worldwide. But the 54,000 figure only includes South Africa and the countries of North Africa, not emerging call centers in places like Ghana and Kenya.
"There's a lot of potential in Africa," said Peter Ryan, an analyst at Datamonitor. "India, the Philippines and Canada are relatively mature, and that means wages and real estate are higher. 220-602 So companies are asking, 'Are there other locations?' "South Africa is far ahead of the rest of the continent, with an estimated 500 call centers employing about 31,000 people. South Africa boasts that the accents of its workers are neutral enough to fool English speakers everywhere. It also has the same time zones as parts of Europe, making doing business easier.