Staff Writer
1 August 2007
With highly trainable young school leavers, Botswana is ready for an aggressive rollout of business outsourcing, experts meeting at the Botswana Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Call Centre conference held at the Gaborone Sun agreed yesterday.
"Botswana is ready to get agents on the go by giving them basic competencies rather than one to three years of research," said Colin Caitens, a development partner at UK-based Academy of Excellence.
"The Accenture study came to the same conclusion that the kind of people we have are easily trainable. They just need a business training course, which is short," added Alan Boshwaen, chief executive officer of the Botswana International Financial Services Centre (IFSC).
Their comments followed an announcement at the conference by the Botswana Training Authority (BOTA) that the organisation, which regulates vocational training, was developing standards for the BPO industry in Botswana.
Mathaka Mmapatsi, Director of Quality Assurance at BOTA, said BOTA was "having interactions" with the industry in order to come up with basic standards to guide the industry, adding that BOTA was also in the process of determining the best benchmark globally.
Since BOTA came into being in the late 1990s, it had developed 400 unique standards in other sectors, he said.
"Once standards have been developed, they are sent abroad to our partners for international best practice. We have a lot of co-operation (out of which) to develop qualifications and standards for the industry." Mmapatsi took the opportunity to defend the time BOTA was taking and the variety of benchmarks being explored for the Botswana BPO industry, saying it was difficult to adhere to one standard.
Some of the countries being looked at for benchmarking are Mauritius, the United Kingdom and South Africa.
"We want to assure Batswana that they are going through the right standard. We cannot adhere to one particular standard."
A delegate from Canada who is said to have 35 years' experience in the BPO and call centre businesses, shared the two speakers' views that Botswana was ready.
However, his view was that ISO certification was already a standard for the industry and advised: "You can start in the short term. Stick with best practice rather than establishing standards."
It has been established that most young people entered the call centre industry while waiting for other opportunities. But the Academy of Excellence recognised that there could be progression in the sector, like moving from being an agent to team leader and then to management.
The one-day conference was organised with the help of the IFSC. It was meant to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and position the country as a competitor in the BPO/call centre industry, which is worth $57 billion (about P352.3 billion) globally.
The small Botswana industry employs 300 young people concentrated in the captive contact centres of Barclays Bank, Water Utilities Corporation (WUC), Standard Charted Bank, and two private players.
Botswana wants to compete with markets like South Africa and India. The latter has been able to develop an industry worth $4 billion (about P24.8 billion) with 300, 000 seats. According to Beza Belayheh, chief executive officer of Bezaspeaks.com, Botswana has a competitive advantage over India because young Batswana speak better English than Indians.
Already, India is seeing a vacation of seats by blue chip companies like Dell, Amazon.com and Microsoft that are looking at places with value for money.
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