« Eastern European Recruitment, Duncross Blog | Main | South Africa BPO »
March 29, 2006
Don't Forget South Africa
Another surprise was South Africa, a country I first visited more than ten years ago, just after Nelson Mandela's election. While there are still significant legacy infrastructure challenges, including a large part of a generation without primary or secondary education, lack of sanitation in informal settlements and townships, as well as some newer ones, like a fine road system showing some signs of needing attention and a power grid that hasn't received sufficient expansion capacity to meet the needs of the added distribution loads additional users create, the same could be said of India.
Which brings me to my point.
In every way I can think of, save two--sheer available numbers of people and a clear Western line of sight to the opportunity for offshore outsourcing the country offers today--South Africa seems an incredibly attractive talent pool. Think about it:
--there exist several excellent universities, including one world-class (and the best on the continent) university (University of Cape Town;
--there exists a large pool of highly educated and underemployed English-speaking talent;
--there exists a culture that today can only be described as stunningly entrepreneurial;
--there exists a completely modern system of capital, telephony, shipping, etc;
--there exists a stable, generally-functional, democratic, pro-business government.
And so on. I could provide a much longer list, but I'll let the country talk for itself. If you're interested in listening, visit this collection of links put together by a South African friend:
--Career Junction, the biggest job portal in SA
--The department of trade and industry
--The Cape government web site
Finally, you'll probably be interested that there's a "homecoming revolution" movement that seeks to encourage South Africa expats to come back to their home country.
Posted by davidkippen at March 29, 2006 09:53 PM