The Ministry of Communications has hired a US-based Business Processes Outsourcing (BPO) advisory company, Avasant, to re-brand and market Ghana as a preferred BPO destination. Executive Secretary of the Ministry's Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) Secretariat, Mr Alhassan Umar, disclosed this to GNA in Accra on Tuesday. He said: "Avasant is on a two year contract to gather data on the BPO market in the country and design promotional tools to market Ghana's BPO potential both here and abroad." Mr Umar explained that the BPO industry comprises companies from which other banks, insurance companies, telecommunication operators and governments outsource their back office jobs such as customer care call centre, business enquiries, data entry and other customer assistance services. He said the BPO industry has generated some US$45 million into Ghana's economy yearly and in the short term the country is targeting between 60 and 70 million dollars a year and one billion dollars per annum in the long term. Mr Umar noted the global leader in the BPO industry has more than two million workers and generates billions of dollars as revenue per annum. "We hope to attract at least 10 major BPO companies from Europe and US to Ghana and we also want to get more local entities like banks and insurance companies, as well as companies from within the sub-region to transfer their back office jobs to BPOs in Ghana," he said. Mr Umar added the ITES has developed a special academic programme to train Ghanaians in BPO skills at the polytechnics and universities to produce enough personnel to engender investor confidence in the country's BPO market. Mr Muralidhar Thata, Avasant Country Manager for Ghana, said the country's advantage as a potential BPO destination depends on the availability of huge redundant fibre optic cables (SAT-3, Glo one and Main one), government's initiative in building ICT parks, political stability, smooth business registration system, tax incentives and the good attitude of BPO staff towards customers. "We also find many educated Ghanaians and lots of French-speaking folks waiting to be absorbed into the job market - all these people have the potential to be retrained to work as BPO staff in Ghana," he said. Mr Thata claimed Ghana has huge potentials for establishing French call centres, to attract BPO jobs from French speaking countries, potentials in graphic design, business enquiry and legal processes outsourcing among others. He noted that challenges the country now encounters are lack of visibility, lack of public awareness about the BPO potential and lack of cohesion between the various sectors of the economy in the area of ICT. "In the second phase of our work, Avasant will facilitate a series of workshops in Ghana to focus on how to maximize potentials and deal with the challenges as well as to promote the E-Ghana brand, "Mr Thata said. The contract awarded to Avasant forms part of the World Bank funded E-Ghana project, which seeks to establish electronic governance, electronic voting and other such systems in Ghana. The deal was sealed in August this year, on the heels of President Barack Obama's visit to Ghana, and would last till November 2011. But Avasant started actual work from October 12, 2009 towards developing a strategy report and a road map for the re-branding and promotion of the E-Ghana brand first to companies in Ghana, other West African countries, East Asia, Europe and the US. In the first phase, which spans over the next two to three weeks, Avasant would come up with a mixed-bag of promotional packages that would include websites, magazines, flyers and postcards among others to promote Ghana's BPO potentials. Source: GNA