The Domestic Turn: Business Process Outsourcing and the Growing Automation of Kenyan Organisations

ABSTRACT

After observing the growth of the Indian and Filipino Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors, Kenyan policy-makers and managers made substantial investments in international internet infrastructure and BPO marketing campaigns. While observers continue to discuss the sector in terms of its international work opportunities, in recent years the sector has increasingly focused on contracts sourced from Kenyan and other East African clients. The government has also refocused efforts on attracting international BPO companies. This domestic turn signals both the difficulties of gaining access to overseas work due to the power of incumbents and the increasing use of the internet and ICT-enabled automation within Kenyan organisations. In effect, better connectivity has enabled a two-way globalisation of services: Kenyan BPO companies can access international work opportunities but connectivity has also contributed to the inflow of international business practices into Kenya. The conclusion examines what these shifts might entail for the sector and its workers in future.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their collaborators, Timothy Waema and Charles Katua for support and helpful input during fieldwork in Kenya. In addition the authors wish to extends thanks to Kate Meagher, Linnet Taylor, Marie Berry, Jana Kleibert, Henrike Florusbosch and Nicolas Friederici for comments on earlier drafts and to the other participants of the panel, Moving Jobs, Moving Workers at the European Conference on African Studies, where the paper was first presented. Lastly, we wish to thank the anonymous reviewers who gave excellent suggestions on how to improve the paper. The research project at the core of this report is based on an initial pilot research project funded by the British Academy in 2010. The larger project was funded by a multi-year ESRC-DFID grant (RES-167-25-0701 | ES/I033777/1). For a more detailed description of methodology employed in the project and for a fuller presentation of the data used, please visit: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-167-25-0701/read

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper we employ the word ‘global’ to refer to not just non-local processes and practices, but also processes/practices that are genuinely trans-national and trans-continental in their scope (see also Massey, 2005 for the fuller discussion of the term).

2. Later assessments of the Indian BPO sector reveal that it too is moving towards increased outsourcing within the national economy as well (Jana Kleibert, personal communication).

3. It should be noted that many analyses of the Kenyan BPO sector rely on secondary materials (Bryce, Hartley, Kassam, Saloojee, & Williams, 2011; Iraki, 2013; Wausi et al., 2013).

4. The project looked at the impact of fibre optic internet connectivity on three sectors of Kenya and Rwanda’s economies: tea, tourism and BPO. This paper focuses on the Kenyan BPO/ITES sector.

5. Author 1, Author 2 and Professor Timothy Waema carried out the interviews with BPO managers and Kenyan policy-makers (49, 10, and 2 respectively).

6. These informal operations were described by several interviewees. Some informal work is still taking place. While these platforms are designed to allow individual users to bid for work, in Kenya, some companies ask employees to use these platforms to source work for the whole workforce, using individual profiles in order to do so.

7. It is unclear whether the firm is still in operation.

8. In order to explicitly address the non-local geographic reach of firms, this article uses the term ‘international’ to refer to all work and clients outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Although other East African and South African work is undoubtedly international, managers themselves distinguish between international work outside of Africa and regional work within Africa.

9. This segment was also envisioned as complementing other sectors of the economy, like tourism, where customer service and natural accents are also valued.

10. It is worth noting that submarine fibre-optic cables are used for all sorts of digitally mediated connectivity. However, this paper focuses exclusively on internet connectivity.

11. Seacom was formed by the coming together of Industrial Promotion Services (a branch of the Agha Khan foundation in Egypt which owns a 26.25% stake), VenFin Limited (now merged with Remgro Ltd. – both also South African – which owns 25%) Convergence Partners (also South African and owning a 12.5% stake) and Shanduka (also South African and also holding 12.5%). The remaining 23.75 per cent was held by Herakles Telecom LLC (an American company).

12. Telkom/Vodacom, MTN and Neotel.

13. These include the World Bank/International Finance Corporation (IFC), European Investment Bank (EIB), African Development Bank (AfDB), Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau).

14. This was a World Bank programme designed to support e-government and ICT outreach projects.

15. For a discussion of the notion that ICTs and internet connectivity ‘disintermediate’ financial and service value chains, please see French and Leyshon (2004).

16. See James and Vira (2012) for a description of the impact of the financial crisis on Indian outsourcing.

17. Impact sourcing promises clients to provide their work to members of marginal communities.

18. The quotation marks denote the neoliberal framing of the project. Participants were initially framed as being self-sufficient ‘entrepreneurs’ in line with Enablis general policy. For a broader discussion of the influence of neoliberal ideologies on African economic development, see Harrison (2010).

19. Question paraphrased from interview discussion (Author 1 fieldnotes).

20. Outcome based work is work whose profits are based on favourable outcomes. For example, a company will only be paid for calls that result in a successful sale, as opposed to the total number of calls made. Such work is generally considered to be challenging and unprofitable, especially for inexperienced companies.

21. For a broader discussion of this conversion process within ethical capitalism, see Catherine Dolan’s work in this special issue and in Dolan and Roll (2013, p. 129).

22. In focus groups, participants felt that exploitation primarily occurs when there are disparities of knowledge and awareness.

23. It is unclear what legal and ethical protection governs this activity but according to Safaricom’s own terms of service, customers give the company the right ‘to disclose any Transaction data or information pertaining to your M-PESA Account to any law enforcement, investigative or regulatory authority including without limitation the Kenya Police, Central Bank of Kenya, Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, Kenya Revenue Authority or any competent Anti-Money Laundering authority for the purposes of any genuine enquiry and investigation …’ This is clearly a controversial activity, and given the contentious nature of debate surrounding Kenya’s new data protection law, we are likely to see growing public scrutiny of such behaviour in future. For an indication of the response to such activities from the Kenyan (media-savvy) public, see the blogpost: http://www.thinkersroom.com/blog/2013/07/kra-safaricom-you/

24. Author 1 fieldnotes.

25. For a discussion of the ‘demonstration effect’ in the Indian BPO sector, please see: Athreye (2003).

26. For a discussion of the privacy and ethical issues of ‘big data’ in relation to Africa, please see Taylor and Schroeder (2015) and Linnet Taylor’s more recent blog entries.