Ghana Tops In Business Process Outsourcing

According to a study made by AT Kearney, Ghana tops in business processing outsourcing in Africa. After seven years of dealing with IT projects, reforming the higher education sector and implementing tax breaks with the BPO industry, Ghana has reaped huge profits.

The report titled “ The 2009 AT Kearney Global BPO Services Location Index” ranked countries for their abilities to handle BPO services. It used a weighted combination of scores on 43 measurements grouped under three criteria which were prospects of finance, availability of skilled work force and business environment.

Though India has led the ranked globally but Ghana is no far behind among the overall ranking in sub- Saharan Africa in terms of actual BPO revenue. South Africa is still the continent's leader in providing quality BPO services. Ghana' s rank was boosted by financial issues.

Ghana scored the highest and followed closely to India for being a quality BPO service providers. The ranking was among 50 countries on the basis of financial attractiveness which included compensation cost,infrastructure costs,tax and regulatory costs.

Yaw Owusu, managing director of Gateway Innovations, part of a venture to promote BPO in Ghana said that, Ghana scored 3.26 which was considerably higher than South Africa which scored 2.28.

Most of the countries have engaged in endless conferences and market research,but the west African nation has worked to have strong police work force and political stability to protect civilians and private property.

Ghana's investment to attract offshore clients started seven years ago, when government set up an incubation facility firm for IT start up companies. Then the government started investing on higher education to incorporate skills which were required to compete global BPO outsourcing service providers. It also set up a special secretariat for IT enabled services and BPO so that, Ghana could be projected as one of the lucrative destination for offshore outsourcing. Meanwhile the private companies set up the Ghana Association of Software and It services Companies( GASSCOM)

According to the Kearney report, Mauritius- the island nation ranks at 25th position. It is due to the availability of high skilled labor and favorable business environment. Presently Mauritius has 1.2 million population and it is in the process of joining the OECD, a symbolic entry into the club of advanced economies. The main strength of Mauritius are in the value added service area. It has boosted business from IT software and services from companies like Oracle and Ceridian- a human resource outsourcing firm.

Presently Ceridian has many vacancy as it serves the francophone market in the CyberTower,the government sponsored technology park. Even companies like Accenture and Infosys use Mauritius for their global delivery functions.

Though Ghana remains at the top position according to the survey carried out by Kearney for BPO desirability, South Africa remains the largest offshore destination in Africa. It has cluster of successful contact centers in Cape Town along with several research and development operations around its aerospace hub in Pretoria.
This year, South Africa dropped to 39th place in desirability rankings after it lost points in all three individual metrics.

The government of Ghana has created a free zone area right outside Accra and other areas in different parts of the country, where companies specializing in Business Process Outsourcing can set up operations.

The best part is that the companies in the free zone area can pay zero taxes for 10 years from the date of commencement of operations and only 8% of the tax after a period of 10 years.