E-Business
Africa now Outsourcing Sector Destination of Choice
The salary ranges of African contact centre agents are anything between $546 and $175 per month. Meanwhile, a contact centre manager can earn up to $2 200, to a minimum of $406 per month.
These findings emerged in a new report that plots the growth of global business services (GBS), also known as business process outsourcing (BPO), on the African continent.
The “2021 Africa Global Business Services (GBS) Benchmarking and Market Report” was conducted by Knowledge Executive between February and July.
It is based on profiling surveys of 504 GBS/BPO service providers, delivery centres, analysts and stakeholders across 19 African nations regarded as having mature and emerging GBS and BPO sectors.
Africa’s large youth population and its “competitive” salary and labour costs are among the drivers behind its rise as an industry powerhouse.
The continent has an abundance of educated youth within its labour pool, with many equipped with multilingual proficiency in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, and some German, Chinese and Italian expertise in some instances, states the report.
This workforce also has high levels of empathy and emotional intelligence. There are also low attrition rates, and strong investor support and incentives.
Speaking during a webinar announcing the report’s findings, Mark Angus, CEO and managing editor of Knowledge Executive, a Pan-African research and media firm, said the African global business services sector is poised for exponential growth over the next three years.
Angus noted that a large population of African youth are entering the labour market. “Youth employees are more suited for GBS operations, as they have the energy, the tenacity to handle the high-paced environment of GBS and BPO operations, especially call centres.”
The salary ranges of African contact centre agents are highly competitive compared to those in the European Union, US and the UK, and range between $175 and $546 per month in terms of salary and labour costs, he stated.
A country-specific focus of the contact centre agents’ salaries shows Tunisia has the highest salary, with $546, followed by Kenya with $534, and $514 in Morocco. Ethiopia has the lowest at $175.
South Africa is number four on the list, with an average monthly salary of $465. At the mid-point are Egypt, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, ranging from $402 to $360 per month.
SA leads as the country with the highest contact centre manager monthly salary of $2 200, followed by Tunisia with $1 702, Kenya $1 616, and Namibia $1 444.
The report also highlights BPO and IT outsourcing as being at the forefront of Africa’s rapid growth rates, bolstered by improved economic governance, relative political stability, as well as focused efforts from African policymakers to support the sector.
Based on market projections, the report shows Africa’s total GBS offshoring market will reach $9.6 billion by 2023, from $7.8 billion in 2021.
Collectively, the domestic and international GBS markets across the continent generate about $15.1 billion in revenue, which is expected to rise to $19.8 billion in 2023.
According to the report, SA and Egypt are the two leading maturing markets.
While many industries have shed jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the global business services/BPO sector managed to create job opportunities during this challenging period, and has been identified as key for future employment prospects.
Within the South African context, the BPO sector has witnessed heightened growth. It is also toutedas one of the green shoots that will steer the country’s economic reconstruction and recovery.
The sector is targeting 100 000 new jobs by 2023 and 500 000 by 2030. SA also claimed top spot as the most favoured offshore location for call centres worldwide, based on the 2021 Front Office BPO Omnibus Survey.
In terms of the estimations of the GBS/BPO workforce sizes in each of the key locations, Angus highlighted that SA and Egypt are neck-and-neck, with 261 082 and 240 000 employees, respectively.
He noted that SA’s GBS/BPO industry consists much more of domestic outsourcing workers at over 200 000, and around 43 000 are international servicing workers.
Meanwhile, Egypt is the other way round, with over 198 000 international servicing workers, and just over 42 000 domestic outsourcing workers, he added.
SA is said to be the continent’s largest GBS player by market share (domestic and international), valued at an estimated $4.7 billion.
“The country has a sizeable English-speaking workforce, with competencies across most outsourcing services, including digitally-enabled contact centre and customer experience lifecycle management services.
“Surveyed enterprise executives rated the country best for contact centre voice, back-office processing and customer administration service delivery,” states the report.
Egypt has the second-largest domestic and international GBS market share on the continent, valued at $4 billion (excluding IT services).
“The country offers a highly-skilled, multilingual, diverse talent pool, with competitive labour costs and the second-largest youth population in Africa (36.3 million citizens aged between 18-35 years). The native Arabic language also opens Egypt to the Arabic market of 300 million consumers.”
Turning to Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, it boasts a well-established ICT sector – the largest on the continent.
“This feature serves as an excellent foundation for developing the country’s GBS industry, which is already valued at an estimated $286.8 million and employing approximately 16 540 workers,” notes the report.
“Coupled with a focus on sector-specific skills and education, the country stands poised to take advantage of the largest population of English speakers in Africa and the highest number of youths aged between 18-35 years in Africa (53 million).”
The report pointed out that smaller nations are also capitalising on this increasing international demand.
Rwanda is an emerging GBS market, with a large population of English- and French-speakers able to service English and Francophone countries. “It offers reliable and advanced communications infrastructure with 95% LTE network coverage.”
Southern African nation Botswana is another emerging GBS location, with the country said to boast macro-economic stability, attractive investment incentives and a growing pool of educated, English-speaking workers.
Senegal has become a popular French alternative market for BPO services. Ghana has a scalable pool of English-speaking and computer-literate talent and a growing youth population. Zimbabwe has bold GBS development plans based on its highly-educated talent pool for niche services.
E-Business
Cyber Resilience a Critical Priority for Manufacturing Amid Rapid Digitalization – Report Shows
As 60% of manufacturers race toward full digitalisation, cyber risk is increasingly manifesting as a business risk, according to a new global report by Kaspersky and VDC Strategy.
This means cybersecurity is not merely a compliance function, it is a cornerstone of production assurance, safeguarding uptime, quality, and operational continuity.
Manufacturers are modernising to deliver safer, more consistent and more cost-effective production and digitalization is moving fast: just 9% of organisations describe themselves as fully digital today, but 60% expect to get there within two years, according to the joint report by Kaspersky and VDC, titled ‘Cyber Resilience, Built for Manufacturing’.
That shift links shop-floor equipment, production lines and site operations to platforms such as Manufacturing execution systems (MES), Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and historians, turning many plants into cyber-physical systems (CPS), where a digital disruption doesn’t stay digital. It can slow production lines, quarantine work in progress, invalidate traceability records, or halt production outright.
What’s driving manufacturing digitalization?
Manufacturers are digitising for measurable operational gains, not novelty. Survey respondents identified the primary drivers of their digital transformation strategy as:
- Improving production output or efficiency (24%)
- Reducing operational or production expenses (15%)
- Enabling new strategic opportunities (14%)
- Improving cyber resilience (13%)
The same connected systems that unlock these gains, including MES, IIoT sensors, automated material handling, remote engineering access, also become the systems that determine whether production can be trusted to keep running.
Cyber risk is now a business risk
Cyber risk has evolved from a mere IT concern to a direct threat to revenue generation, as environments transform into cyber-physical systems. In these integrated settings, digital disruptions like malware no longer just affect data, they can cause unsafe operations, scrapped batches, and halted production on the plant floor. This shift highlights the urgent need to treat cybersecurity as a key part of operational resilience.
According to the report, nearly 60% of manufacturing organisations estimate that cyber incidents cause damages exceeding $1 million per event, with an average disruption of 15.3 hours. The most significant losses often result from production halts, missed delivery commitments, and penalties, rather than just forensic costs.
In this context, downtime links cybersecurity risks to overall business performance. Cyber incidents can reduce Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), strain staffing, and disrupt supply chains. Recovery involves more than system restore, it requires re-establishing confidence in process parameters, quality records, and traceability before resuming operations.
Mature cybersecurity programs now incorporate OT security into governance, focusing on metrics valued by production leaders such as time to restore, backup confidence, legacy asset coverage, and safe degraded operation. This alignment ensures cybersecurity supports continuous production and resilience, not just IT compliance.
However, challenges remain due to split ownership. While 59% of organisations’ IT departments manage security policies, these often overlook plant realities. Managing many security tools (44%) and OT patching issues (38%) show that cybersecurity must be embedded into daily routines of production, engineering, and quality teams. Only through such integration can cybersecurity effectively enhance operational reliability and defend against evolving threats.
“As manufacturing environments become increasingly interconnected, cybersecurity shifts focus from merely adding protective layers to ensuring the availability, resilience, and integrity of production processes. The goal is to minimise operational impact and speed up recovery, rather than solely preventing intrusions.
“Kaspersky offers a unified ecosystem that integrates IT, OT, and IIoT security, empowering manufacturers to pursue digital transformation securely. This strategy helps maintain operational continuity and reduces long-term cybersecurity costs,” comments Andrey Strelkov, Head of Industrial Cybersecurity Product Line at Kaspersky.
To implement this strategy, manufacturing companies can leverage solutions from the Kaspersky OT Cybersecurity Ecosystem, centered around Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity (KICS), a native Extended Detection and Response platform designed for critical infrastructure protection. KICS enables centralised detection and response to complex attacks across the entire industrial network, ensuring comprehensive visibility and security.
Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has commenced a forensic investigation into the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Lotus Bank and Hackerbella Ltd over alleged violations of data protection laws involving students’ personal information.
The investigation follows public complaints alleging that students’ personal data were used to open bank accounts without a lawful basis.
Dr Vincent Olatunji, national commissioner and chief executive officer of the NDPC, directed the investigation team to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the circumstances surrounding the collection, processing, use and disclosure of the affected students’ personal data.
The investigation will also determine the respective roles and responsibilities of UNILAG, Lotus Bank and Hackerbella in the alleged processing of the data.
According to the Commission, the investigation will assess the data protection compliance obligations of the parties under the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 (NDP Act), as well as potential risks posed to the rights and freedoms of the affected data subjects.
The NDPC said the probe would cover several areas, including Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), the lawfulness and transparency of credit scoring or profiling activities, and the use of automated decision-making systems.
It will also examine the adequacy of privacy notices, data-sharing arrangements, lawful bases for processing, data minimisation and purpose limitation.
Other areas include data retention policies and the adequacy of technical and organisational measures put in place to safeguard the rights and personal data of affected students.
The Commission reiterated that institutions entrusted with the personal data of students, staff and other members of their communities have a heightened responsibility to ensure that such information is processed lawfully, fairly, transparently and securely.
The NDPC therefore warned educational institutions that are yet to comply with its existing data protection compliance directives to take immediate steps to achieve compliance.
The Commission said it would continue to exercise its regulatory mandate to protect the privacy rights of Nigerians and ensure that organisations processing personal data comply with the provisions of the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023.
Microsoft is planning to unveil its new Maia 300 AI chip this fall, potentially as soon as next month, The Information reported on Monday, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.
The company introduced its Maia AI chip in November 2023 but has lagged rivals such as Alphabet and Amazon in scaling up its in-house chip efforts as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Nvidia’s costly processors.
Google began recognizing revenue from direct sales of its custom AI chips, called Tensor Processing Units, in the quarter ended June, while Amazon has also seen growing adoption of its processors, including its Trainium chips.
Microsoft has been in talks with chipmaker TSMC to secure manufacturing capacity for more than 300,000 units of the chip for delivery in 2027, according to the report. It is also looking to significantly ramp up production and persuade major cloud customers such as Anthropic to adopt the chip.
Microsoft ultimately aims to secure capacity for more than 1 million Maia 300 chips, though component supplies and ongoing capacity negotiations with TSMC could constrain its plans, according to the report.
It unveiled its second-generation Maia 200 in January, built by TSMC using 3-nanometer technology.
Microsoft packed the chip with a significant amount of SRAM, a type of memory that can provide speed advantages for AI systems handling large numbers of user requests.
Nigeria Not Making Progress in Fiscal Transparency –US
NCAA to Introduce RFID Technology to Tackle Missing Luggages
SEC Directs Operators to Subscribe to NigSac Alerts, Freeze Terrorists-Linked Funds
Davido Bets $1m in Hit-for-Hit Battle with Colleagues
GSMA Industry Services Unveils Circularity Services to Help Operators Reduce E-Waste and Unlock Value
EFCC Busts NIS Visa Overstay Racket, Uncovers N700m in an Account
Fact-Check: Elon Musk’s “Tesla Pi Phone” is Internet Rumor
NBC Tasks Broadcasting Stations over 2028 DSO Global Deadline
NBC Scraps Annual Digital Access Fee on DSO
Glo Sponsored African Voices to Feature Netflix’s “The Polygamist” Stars
News2 days agoMoove Achieves Unicorn Status With $250m Funding
Telecom2 days agoMTN Nigeria Clocks 25, Connects over 90m People
E-Financial2 days agoFG Suspends NAICOM’s N680m Insurance Recapitalisation Fees
E-Business2 days agoMicrosoft to Unveil Next-generation AI Chip in September
Broadcasting2 days agoAffordable, Flexible Streaming Platforms May Kill PAYtv – Report
Telecom2 days agoSubscribers to Seek Legal Redress if Poor Quality of Service Continue in September
E-Financial2 days agoSEC Moves to Recover Unclaimed Dividends, Inherited Investments Nationwide
Telecom2 days agoipNX Collaborates with ICT Stakeholders on the Future of Fibre-to-the-Home in Nigeria @ ATCON Forum