Outsourcing not coming to Africa soon
By Techgirl

NASSCOM released an audit report of our booming IT/BPO sector last week. Despite the recession, NASSCOM announced the sector reached USD 58.8 billion in FY08-09 up from USD 52 billion in FY07-08. Export revenues for the Indian IT-BPO industry recorded growth of 16.3 percent and clocked revenues of USD 46.3 billion in FY08-09 up from USD 40.4 billion in FY07-08.

The domestic segment grew by 21% to register revenues of INR 570 billion in FY08-09 from INR 470 billion in FY07-08.

Even as India consolidates and grows, China, Philippines, South America and even Egypt are mirroring our success story. But looks like Africa will have to wait a few more years.

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is one of the key players in the world of tech journalism and outsourcing.  Mark is so highly regarded that he has been invited as one of the judges for Computing Magazine Awards, NOA Outsourcing Awards as well as CNET Tech awards.  He has been invited to speak by a number of prestigious organizations like NASSCOM and London School of Economics.

Mark has just blogged a post ‘Out of Africa’

“
Last year I did some interesting work for the International Trade Centre – an agency of the United Nations that promotes trade with developing regions. I helped to design the structure of the fledging African Outsourcing Association, and I went to Nigeria to speak to a group of African IT leaders – eventually convincing them that the proposed body could really help them to change the impression of the African hi-tech services industry.

Unfortunately, the UN has decided to discontinue the funding for this initiative. Individual countries are talking about supporting a big conference somewhere in Africa later this year, but I expect the entire programme of work will just fizzle out. In any case, one-off or annual conferences are unlikely to change much.

This is such a shame. There are several African countries with stable and supportive governments, good infrastructure, educated people... in fact, all the ingredients needed to create the environment for IT-enabled services.
“

Africa’s loss is our gain. I can visualize NASSCOM executives giving each other high fives when they read Mark’s post.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com