The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Africa looks to India for IT

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Tuesday, Feb 24, 2009
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Karnataka - Bangalore

Africa looks to India for IT

Nagesh Prabhu

Team from eight nations visits Bangalore, other cities in the country

Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Madagascar, Mozambique, Senegal and Tanzania represented
Lack of skills and talent cited as a barrier to the development of IT-BPO firms in Africa

— Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

Study tour: World Bank Africa Region representatives (from left) Jee-Peng Tan, Yaw Ansu, Randeep Sudan and Peter Materu during their recent visit to Bangalore.

BANGALORE: Eight African countries have shown keen interest in forging ties with information technology (IT) firms and the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) to develop IT-related skills and industries in their nations.

A high-level delegation comprising senior government officials and educators from Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Tanzania visited Bangalore and other cities over the past fortnight to study Indian IT, infrastructure and investment policies.

A member of the delegation said “we are ready to forge linkages with Indian IT industry”.

Growth potential

Jee-Peng Tan, Yaw Ansu, Peter N. Materu and Anubha Verma, education experts in the World Bank’s African Region section, and Randeep Sudan, lead ICT policy specialist of the bank, told The Hindu that IT-BPO was a nascent industry in Africa and offered exciting potential for growth and job creation in the continent. However, lack of relevant skills and talent was cited as a barrier to the development of IT-BPO firms in Africa. The delegation visited Mumbai and Hyderabad under the bank’s initiative, New Economy Skills for Africa Programme. The initiative aims at assisting African countries in building skills for economic growth and competitiveness.

Job creation

“The Indian experience demonstrated how the IT and ITES industry can be a great way to participate in the global economy and create jobs if the right skills are nurtured,” said a member of the team that visited the Infosys headquarters here.

Delegation members also visited the Reliance BPO facilities in Mumbai, the Indian School of Business and the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad.

‘A mirror’

“The visit to Bangalore provided us with a mirror to assess our own work back home and fill in the gaps,” said Mr. Ansu. IT-BPO was a global phenomenon that would be sustained, and which would only grow over time, he said.

Ms. Jee-Peng, the bank’s education adviser for Africa, took note of the close cooperation and interaction between industry and training providers in identifying skills gaps and designing programmes to fill these gaps. “India’s experience contains ample lessons for Africa on how to grow and upgrade a country’s talent pool to support an increasingly sophisticated IT-BPO industry,” she said.

Mr. Ansu said India’s leadership and experience in the IT-BPO sector provided a rich repository of policy and practical lessons for African policymakers to help guide efforts to grow IT-related services in their countries. The team was inspired to build a Nasscom-like organisation for East Africa. The team learnt about the certification process for IT-BPO skills, he said.

Acknowledging that the key to India’s success has been heavy investment in education, they said exposure to the “Hyderabad story” was particularly inspiring for African participants, because starting from a poor, largely agricultural base — a situation similar to many African countries today — the State had catapulted itself to become a global IT-BPO destination within a decade.

Government support

The team also studied the extent of Government support enjoyed by the Indian IT-BPO industry through infrastructure development and training programmes.

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