London, Dec 22 - Kenya could become the world's latest call-centre capital as rising wages make India less competitive, the Times newspaper reported Saturday.With a pool of educated youth who have good English skills, the Kenyan government hopes it will create 100,000 new jobs in the next five years and rival India's outsourcing industry.Employment costs are higher in Kenya than in India, but the newspaper quoted one employer as saying her staff had already won contracts ahead of Indian companies because of their stronger grasp of English.According to figures compiled by the paper from the Global Call Centre Network and the Kenyan industry, the average annual income for call centre workers is $2,300 in India, $4,000 in Kenya and $3,100 in Brazil - compared to $24,500 in Britain, $18,400 in France and $10,500 in South Africa.With infrastructure posing a problem, the Kenyan government this month signed an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent for a fibre-optic cable linking the port of Mombasa with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which will connect East Africa to the internet.Work on the 5,000-km East African Marine System is due to begin early in the New Year. The $80 million cable, which will run from Fujaira in the UAE along the seabed of the Gulf of Oman to Mombasa, is expected to bring down the cost of connectivity to about $500 a month in Kenya.Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communications, said the cost would continue to decline, as Kenya became an outsourcing hub for East Africa, selling bandwidth to neighbours Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.His aim is to turn the 3,000-job industry into one that employs 100,000 by 2012, the newspaper reported.In a recent report, Datamonitor, the world's leading provider of online data and analyses, forecast that Africa would see the fastest growth in the number of call centres for the rest of the decade especially in Botswana, Egypt, Ghana and Kenya for rapid expansion.
(c) Indo-Asian News Service
