2 airlines moving call centers to Kenya |
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Published
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Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:41
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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Two major airlines are planning to shift their call centers to Kenya from India in anticipation of a submarine optical fiber cable being laid on the eastern Africa coast, a senior government official said Friday.At present, eastern Africa relies on satellites for its international telecommunication needs, such as receiving and sending data, which is more expensive than using a submarine optical fiber cable.The two airlines will set up call centers in Kenya and the government aims to subsidize their telecommunication costs to retain the business, said Bitenge Ndemo, the information and communications permanent secretary. He declined to name the airlines.Ndemo said that the new investment will create 2,000 jobs in Kenya. The airlines are willing to invest in Kenya because of the quality of the country's human resources, Ndemo said.Scores of multinational companies farm out services to companies in countries such as India, where wages are low and skilled workers are plentiful. Kenya has at least one call center already.India has in the past decade come to dominate the outsourcing industry, with the country's revenues totaling $6.3 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 2006.Kenya wants to become a center for business processing outsourcing operations, Ndemo said. To attract more companies to Kenya it needs to increase its bandwidth to up to 500 megabits by year's end and subsidize the current costs until the submarine optical fiber cable is laid out sometime in 2008, he said.'We must supply the bandwidth to retain that business in this country. If we don't, we will lose it,' he said.Ndemo told The Associated Press that the World Bank will lend Kenya money from July to help fund such subsidies to reduce the monthly costs of bandwidth that is provided through satellites to below $1,000, from the current $7,500.He declined to give the total value of the World Bank loan.Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Kenya phone companies told to cut costs 