Looking on the bright side
Yeah, Africa needs to get in the mix somehow. And since they're doing the call center thing even cheaper than prison labor would maybe the need to jail so many Americans will be reduced.
Cynical, I know.
Anyway...
Accents of Africa: A New Outsourcing Frontier
By MARC LACEY
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 30 - Susan Mina, a Kenyan who has never stepped foot out of Africa, speaks English like the haughtiest of Britons. She can also put on a fair imitation of an American accent by swallowing all her words. Still, every once in a while, some Swahili slips out of her and that is not at all helpful as she tries to enhance Africa's role in the global explosion of outsourcing.
It happened the other day when she was trying to get a British man to sign up for a new cellular telephone service. He was in his home, minding his own business. She sat near the Nairobi airport, doing her business as a sales agent for KenCall, Kenya's first international call center. The man's accent - she pegged it as Irish - was unintelligible to her. "Pole sana?" she blurted out, which is what one says in Swahili instead of "Huh?"
Controlling one's Swahili is just one of the challenges that Kenyans are facing as they play catch-up in an industry that India and other countries have turned into major job generators.
Kenya's regular phone lines are so abysmal that the founders of KenCall had to go through the cumbersome process of getting government approval to use a costly satellite hookup. Even more dollars were burned on an elaborate generator system aimed at keeping KenCall's computer screens running during Nairobi's frequent power failures.
"Africa needs to raise its game," said Russell Southwood, who publishes an online newsletter on telecommunications in Africa at balancingact-africa.com. "It needs to show the world that it can do more than pick minerals out of the ground and grow fruits and vegetables."
KenCall is now up and running, and eager to lure business from Western companies that want cheap labor - but educated cheap labor like Ms. Mina, who has a university degree but earns less than $5,000 a year, not as much as a fast-food cashier would make in the United States.
