ITES-BPO – opportunity for Uganda
As the services sector is becoming more competitive and globalized, organizations are looking to outsource their non-core functions in order to gain agility, efficiency, access to newer talent and markets and save costs. ITES-BPO, defined as outsourcing of business functions to third party service providers or captive centres in low cost countries, is an important lever to achieve this objective.
Uganda’s geographical proximity with Europe, large youth population and growing service sector employment provides it an excellent opportunity to grow its ITES-BPO market share, domestically, regionally and internationally. Having recognized the ITES-BPO as an employment creator of youth and enabler of economic growth, Uganda has taken a positive step forward. Further, NITA-U’s initiatives like strategizing the ITES-BPO growth, creating incentivizing schemes, developing the infrastructure and initiating ITES-BPO training are encouraging signs for the growth of Ugandan ITES-BPO industry.
Current State Analysis of Key Drivers to the ITES-BPO Industry
The targeted action plan for Uganda’s ITES-BPO industry, is based on a thorough study of Uganda’s capacity in four critical areas – human capital, infrastructure, business environment and supporting structures was conducted. Uganda’s ratings and scores across these factors were benchmarked and compared against most relevant leading and emerging destinations which were India, Kenya, Ghana and Jamaica.
The following summarizes Uganda’s current potential to create a vibrant ITES-BPO industry.
Strengths
- Large pool of potentially good English speaking population.
- Competitive labor costs differential to U.S. and U.K. companies.
- Stable geo-political environment in comparison with neighboring as well as other countries worldwide.
- ITES-BPO sector identified as a focus areas for economic development by the Government.
- Availability and penetration of telecom and Internet services are rising.
- Cyber laws to protect ITES-BPO investors have been promulgated.
Opportunities
- Leverage the image of its democratic and stable political environment towards establishing itself as a regional hub for offshoring services.
- Establish itself as a subcontracting hub for more established destinations.
- Develop offerings such as call centre and data processing in the short and medium term for the domestic, regional and international market
- Leverage opportunities created by the e-Governance initiatives to kick start the Industry