Around 1m Africans work in business-process outsourcing (BPO), about 2% of the industry's global workforce. The sector covers anything from call centres and insurance-claims processing to content moderation for social media and data annotation for artificial intelligence. Between 2023 and 2028 the industry is expected to grow by around 14% a year in Africa, nearly twice the global BPO growth rate of 8%.
Three-quarters of young Africans report they cannot find adequate work. Traditional manufacturing, which powered growth in countries such as South Korea and Vietnam, requires ever more complex machinery but ever fewer humans to operate it, making BPO a more promising source of mass employment.
Anglophone Africa has a youthful, increasingly well-educated population with strong English-language skills. The continent's time zones are convenient for businesses in America and Europe. Labour costs in Kenya, the leading hub, are 60-70% lower than in America, Europe and Australia. Workers in India and the Philippines, the traditional outsourcing centres, are getting richer and therefore more expensive.
Kenya's national BPO policy, due in July 2025, aims to create 1m jobs in five years. Nigeria launched its "Outsource to Nigeria" scheme in 2024. Both offer tax breaks and subsidies. South Africa gives cash grants for new BPO jobs.
More than 40% of tasks in the African BPO industry are at risk of automation, according to a report by Caribou and Genesis Analytics in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. Content-moderation work in particular has drawn criticism: workers complain of being forced to stare at disturbing content without adequate psychological support. Former moderators in Kenya have sued Meta and Sama, a Californian BPO company, over working conditions. Companies at the top of a BPO supply chain can relocate overnight: Meta quietly moved its content-moderation work from Kenya to Ghana following litigation.
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