East African Business Week

KAMPALA UGANDA - Up to 500 students have graduated from the college of computing and information sciences under the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) at Makerere University.
The students were guided on different ways to seek job opportunities through career guidance and counseling.
BPO, which is the strategic use of third party service providers to perform activities traditionally handled by internal staff and resources, aimed at providing participants with knowledge and skills that can enable them pass the internationally accredited certification in BPO.
Mr  Aggrey Awori, the Minister of Information and Communications Technology, said at the ceremony the training programme would provide an opportunity for the country to gain a competitive edge over other emerging BPO markets. This was because of the key role BPO skilled personnel played in attracting both local and international BPO business."The BPO industry is expected to take advantage of the National Back Bone infrastructure and other communication facilities provided by our local service providers like the telecom companies and internet service providers," Awori said. In addition to the training, the government was in the process of acquiring its own BPO center where operators can hire space to run their business among other incentives in order to empower the existing BPO operators to serve both local and international clients.
The Makerere center will employ over 300 youth while the second one, whose location is yet to be decided, will create over 1000 jobs diretly.
Ms.Gilda Odera, the director and founder of the BPO academy in Uganda emphasized that the success factors of ensuring the growth of the BPO industry in any country was the government's prioritization of BPO skills development.
"A multi-pronged approach of tackling all the challenges of the BPO sector should be used to ensure that our industry grows in a relatively shorter time compared to other African neighbours," Odera said.
Countries like India, Philippines and Mauritius have cashed in on this industry and are making billions of dollars through provision of information technology services (ITES) to American, European and Asian companies.
India now controls between 5-8% shares of the world total BPO industry.