The emergent African call centre industry is fast becoming a major source of employment for low skilled job seekers. Consequently, call centre operators are playing a role in increasing e-literacy among of the workforce.

“This type of employment did not exist five years ago,” said Nicholas Maweni, Marketing Director of ATIO Corporation. “New recruits receive training in the call centres and gain important telephony and computer skills crucial to working in the knowledge economy.”

There are two key factors encouraging this job creation trend. Increased outsourcing of call centres operations to Africa by international players stimulates the demand for jobs. To meet this demand, local operators are turning to a labour pool that is proficient in the English language.

Overseas call centre operations are recognising Africa’s investment potential. Since 2000, European and US companies have been making steady investments in outsourced call centre solutions with African partners. While South Africa is the market leader on the continent, the main distribution in the rest of Africa is Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The average employment in an Africa call centre is comparable to their international counterparts. Call centres are considered to be large employers. An operation servicing international clients usually has between 20 to 300 plus seats. Yet the steady demand for help desk agents is also accentuated by a high churn rate, a loss of staff due to a challenging client-centred work environment and the workforce using call centres as a stepping-stone to employment in other sectors.

According to Maweni, “To meet their staffing demands local call centre operators are offering employment opportunities to well-spoken English language candidates. These low barriers to entry into the job market favour the growth of call centres in African countries with a large labour pool supported by a good communications infrastructure.”

Companies are recruiting call centre agents with low technology skills but good English proficiency. Agents are provided with training in linguistic refinement to align accents to client’s international expectation, although customers in the US and UK are becoming increasingly used to hearing cosmopolitan accents when calling a contact centre.

Agents are also educated in the use of technology. Call centre operations provide in-house training to help desk agents to answer telephones and interact via computer aided telephony services. In cases were agents have low levels of literacy, and may not be able to read the computer screen to follow instructions, training on the use of help desk facilities directly addresses literacy skills development.

“The growing call centre industry in Africa, in its contribution to skills development and e-literacy within the workforce, will play an important role in diminishing the digital divide on the continent,” said Maweni.

ENDS