Comments on: Outsourcing: Kenya gunning for India’s crown?

By: accuratedataentry

accuratedataentry — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 05:52:18 +0000

Hi to all.. First of all, I’d really like to appreciate this wonderful blog. Thanks for sharing.

By: Kennedy Kamau

Kennedy Kamau — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:04:45 +0000

Greetings to all and congratulations for holding such insightful discussions about my country Kenya.

I ran into this page by sheer luck. I am an experienced programmer, database and web applications developer. I do a few project for US/Canadian and UK based companies but I must admit the Indians are a force to reckon with. They will bid extremely low for high quality technical work. This dissuades me from even going further. For US/UK/Canadian based buyers, talk to me if you need small, medium and largescale providers, telemarketers, programmers etc. The cables have landed!

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:24:32 +0000

This is an eye opener indeed. I run into this website as i was doing a research on the Outsorcing business in Kenya and Africa in general. I am proud that the Kenyan Govt has prioritised in the Fibre optics which by now should be ready.

I am confident that Kenya will attract enough investors and will be the next outsourcing hub weighing all the pros and cons.This will also create jobs for thousands youths in my country. I am working on a documentary which i cant give details now, but once i am done with it, i will definately post it on the Yu tube, face book, and “here” for all and sundry to see, and i will appreciate any constructive criticism.

By: Josef Garvi

Josef Garvi — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:51:14 +0000

Just dropped back to this thread, and read the encouraging replies from Hannington and Ombogoni. Glad to hear about your successes. I hope there will be more of them in the future. I am still waiting to meet my first fellow west african Java programmer in real life, and hope I will be meeting many soon! 🙂 That said, I must confess that I am not located in the best situated geographical area (eastern Niger). And I do see that the number of people working with IT is growing by the year, just haven’t really seen the programming sector take off quite yet. But I do believe it will, one day!

By: Charles Ombongi

Charles Ombongi — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 09:44:39 +0000

I am new to this forum, I have read a number of comments and my reply will be to a particular consern by Josef Garvi about the level of skilled programers in Kenya, I want to assure Mr. Josef we indeed have many skilled programmers in any language that you can think of, the only problem is that the rest of the world knows Kenya as a tourist destination and an athletics powerhouse. The government of Kenya as already initiated a number of infrastructural projects to make Kenya a BPO destination of choice, we believe in the next few days you are going to see state of the art software exports from kenya, my company is the latest entrant into outsourced software development http://www.skycomafrica.com

Charles Ombongi
Business Development Manager
skycom technologies

By: Hannington

Hannington — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:11:45 +0000

Josef, actually we do have quite a large number of software programmers over here. From .Net, Oracle, Delphi, you name it. Whatever you require, trust me you’ll get it here – and they are profficient programmers for that matter.

My company has been in BPO since 1998. Amongst the biggest software projects we’ve done, which is still on-going, is the developement of Clinical Software for European Hospitals – mainly British, but also used in Germany and Australia. Our software is currently being used by about 23 hospitals accross these regions.

Alhough we were more or less the pioneers of Software outsourcing in this region, other companies have come up as well but the main BPO avenue for them is Call Center and Telemarketting which we’ve also ventured into and is doing pretty well despite poor IT infrastructure.

The main challenge as I see it, at least from our experience, is that most of the companies in the west do not trust African solutions easily, be it software solution or a call center solution. You should hear some of the comments our marketting staff encounter in their day to day endeavours to lure these companies to do business with us.

Fortunately, once they get a taste of the quality of service rendered, they never get disappointed and never cease to regret their earlier sentiments.

I hope one of you will be doing business with us in a short while to experience it for yourselves.

By: Josef Garvi

Josef Garvi — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:35:48 +0000

Would be great if this is the case. The biggest issue in Africa will be finding enough skilled programmers. My experience from West Africa is that they are not so numerous yet, but lets hope they become soon! And of course, there are more things that can be outsourced besides programming (customer support centers, data collection and so forth). I think the recession will increase the interest in outsourcing, as companies will try to cut costs to improve their profits / cushion their losses.

By: Kimmy B

Kimmy B — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:46:23 +0000

Interesting! I had no idea that this was happening. I suspect it would be great for that region if they could get an influx of money through offshore outsourcing.

I also wonder what will happen with outsourcing and offshoring in general now that a recession is hitting us. Will it increase or decrease?

By: Adrian

Adrian — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:20:51 +0000

What is the level of education in Kenya versus that of India? Are they competitive? I’m asking because I simply don’t have a clue. 🙂