Ray For Hope For BPO Employees In Kenya !

The government of Kenya has assured BPO job seekers to provide outsourcing jobs, after there were rising number of job cuts by business process outsourcing industry.

Safaricom, one of the most profitable companies in East and Central Africa, demonstrated that, private sector is not about to outsource its non core services when it opened its Jambo Contact Center incurring a cost of 800 million Kenya shillings( US$10.6 million)

Paul Kukubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board, the agency charged with marketing Kenya's BPO industry said that, the government is ready to outsource its non core, non sensitive services to the local BPO service provider. This is because Safaricom still does not understands the benefits of outsourcing of outsourcing.

The subscribers of Safaricom were happy with the customer services provided by a local BPO company but still the BPO industry was in loss. The local contact center has currently employed 1,500 staff and can handle 100,000 calls from the 13 million Safaricom subscribers.

Gilda Odera, the managing director of Skyweb-Evans and chairperson of the Kenya BPO Society said that, it was a matter of time before Safaricom will be forced to outsource work as a part of the contact. Safaricom should play a part of their corporate responsibility by outsourcing their non core functions to one or two local BPO companies.

The CEO of Safaricom Michael Joseph said that in the launching of the contact center, the company will effectively allow to handle customer queries and be a medium between the company and the subscribers.

According to the managing director of the outsourcing company Cascade Global,Peres Were, the government is not doing much to promote local outsourcing;the digitalization process is going too slow. The BPO industry has been trained on various aspects of the government services and the companies are waiting for the results.

The government of Kenya is still not ready to digitize the business processes even before the present fibre-optic cables became operational. The process has been slowed down due to lack of fund for the local and international BPO marketing strategies.

Regarding the era of digitization at the Ministry of Lands,the ICT Board's Kukubo argued that, the board had sent a proposal to the cabinet, paving the way for a public-private partnership, and the document is yet to be approved.

Kukubo said that digitizing records is only one such aspect at the Ministry of Lands, they need to periodically maintain the overall manual system and introduce a system from the most basic to the most complex at the ministry.

The Ministry of Land is one of the busiest government agency and has been considered to be one of the most corrupt areas due to sky rocketing prices of the land. The process of ownership is quite prolonged and tedious. It requires people to travel from upcountry to Nairobi even for simple tasks finding the owner of the property.