Africa Gets in on Outsourcing Bonanza

Susan Mina, a Kenyan who has never stepped foot out of Africa, speaks English like the haughtiest of Britons. She can also put on a fair imitation of an American accent by swallowing all her words. Still, every once in a while, some Swahili slips out of her, and that is not at all helpful as she tries to enhance Africa’s role in the global explosion of outsourcing.

It happened the other day when she was trying to get a British man to sign up for a new cellular telephone service. He was in his home, minding his own business. She sat near the Nairobi airport, doing her business as a sales agent for KenCall, Kenya’s first international call center. The man’s accent – she pegged it as Irish – was unintelligible to her. “Pole sana?” she blurted out, which is what one says in Swahili instead of “Huh?”