South Africa seeks call center expansion

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With an unemployment rate sitting at between 30 and 40 percent, South Africa has begun to look to the call center industry as a solution to this problem as more and more international companies have begun to outsource that portion of their operations. At the present time, South Africa employs approximately 50,000 individuals in call centers, still mostly handling domestic callers. However, several international companies, including Kodak, Samsung, and Lufthansa have recently begun to use South African call centers. Those who support bringing even more call centers for international companies to South Africa argue that their country has some distinct advantages in serving European and North American callers, compared to their closest competitor in the sector, India. They claim that besides sharing a time zone with much of Europe, South Africa has more in common culturally with Europe and North America than India does. Another advantage supporters of the call centers cite is the similarity between the Afrikaans language and Dutch. Dutch-speakers arrived in South Africa in the seventeenth century, and while the two languages have diverged in the intervening years, the two languages still share about 85 percent of their words. This makes it fairly easy to train South African Afrikaans speakers to serve Dutch-speaking callers, besides serving the English-speaking populations of the UK and North America.