Editor's Blog

BPO: out of Africa for now
Tuesday, July 29, 2008

As I mentioned in a recent blog, Africa has been taking a number of small steps (if not yet giant leaps) towards being a centre for offshore BPO services. Ghana, Morocco, Egypt and Senegal are all on analysts’ ‘ones to watch tables’, to which we can add Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. European language skills and near-European timezones are much in the continent’s favour.

South Africa has been particularly vocal about its strategy: in recent years the country has stated its intention to create 100,000 BPO seats by 2009.

However, analysts at Frost & Sullivan anticipate that the total number of outsourced seats will reach just 60,000 over the next five to seven years: a long way short of the government’s target, and over an extended timescale. It’s estimated there are 25,000 BPO seats today, at most.

“The planned growth in the industry is unlikely to be realised under current circumstances,” says Frost & Sullivan research analyst Spiwe Chireka.

“This is due to a number of factors, particularly that South Africa’s value propositions are not all relevant. The country is relying increasingly on factors such as good language capabilities, favourable timezones, its advanced financial services sector and strong government support which investors are not necessarily looking for anymore.” Foreign investment, of course, is crucial to the success of the programme.

Frost & Sullivan says that the number of South African call centres has risen from 450-odd in 2004 to over 1,300 in 2007. That said, the maths are simple: with a maximum of 25,000 BPO seats in total, that’s a lot of small operations.

So what are investors looking for? Essentially, IT and contact centre skills, which are thinner on the ground in South Africa, and throughout much of the continent, than they should be.

“Language and timezones have become irrelevant as most offshore destinations are operating 24 hour centres and have large English speaking populations,” says Frost & Sullivan’s Chireka.

“Also, the largest outsourced services in the US and UK, which are South Africa’s target markets, are information technology and contact centres. However, South Africa’s IT and contact centre skills are limited, which is a major hindrance to its success as an alternative destination.”

Into the mix we should also throw the perceived political instability of small parts of the huge African continent – particularly relevant to a US market whose grasp of overseas affairs is limited in scope and parochial in impact – and the patchy, and therefore expensive, telecoms infrastructure.

That said, India notoriously had one of the worst telecoms networks in the world until very recently, but that has been no brake on its ambitions.

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