Egypt tops African outsourcing league table

9 Mar 2009

A report outlining the outsourcing readiness of 15 African nations was released at the first Africa Outsourcing Summit organised by CBC Technology earlier last week. Topping the report was Egypt followed by Mauritius, South Africa, Tunisia and Morocco.

Though all nations in the report have outsourcing capabilities, infrastructure seems to play a key role in the offering. The importance of people and skills however, should not be underplayed; Egypt, Mauritius and South Africa were ranked highly at exposing their populous to ICT for example. Other factors such as the business environment, political risk, availability of bandwidth and economic outlook also weighted the ranking.

The full 400 page report is now available for download from the Commonwealth Business Council website at http://www.cbcglobal.org.

At the two-day summit the report's findings were discussed, and responses to the research came from Mandisi Mpahlwa, Minister of Trade and Industry, South Africa, Dr Tarek El-Sadany, senior adviser to the Ministry for Technology Policies, Egypt and Professor Peter Msolla, Minister for Communication Science and Technology, Tanzania, who each outlined their countries strategy for an enhanced outsourcing capability.

Further representation from Kenya, Botswana, Rwanda and Mauritius responded to the report's findings, which ranked the countries in order of readiness.

Vijay Amliwala, managing director of CBC Technology said at the summit, "This is the first summit focusing purely on Africa's IT sector.

"Clearly there's a lot of work still to be done and we have had very positive feedback from the government and ministers to move the Africa agenda forward to truly make it a compelling destination for outsourcing.

"I look forward to seeing the report develop and deepen over the coming years and reflecting analytically the growth in Africa."