Africa's booming white-collar sweatshops:
Parisian accent at a West African wage
Nafi Diouf AP
Saturday, July 10, 2004
DAKAR, Senegal On the job, she is Dominique Mercier - nattering in lilting French, working her headset hard eight hours a day, and hawking telephone subscriptions to the European consumer.
Come the end of her shift, the accent drops, Dominique becomes Fatou, and her true identity is revealed: Fatou Ndiaye, a 32-year-old Senegalese college graduate, and one of thousands of operators dialing up the West from booming call centers in West Africa.
"When I applied for this job, I did not know what it was, or what to expect," said Ndiaye, now a supervisor watching over her squad of a dozen operators wearing Islamic head scarves, West African robes, or Western clothes, all with headsets.
The women chatter away in the finest - faked - Parisian accents to consumers in France, 6,000 kilometers, or 3,700 miles, to the north.
"Now, I can tell you, it's pure thrill," Ndiaye said at her work station, a cubicle among cubicles in a vast air-conditioned room of immaculate white walls and picture windows.
Across West Africa, varying degrees of instability, corruption and decay long have scared outside businesses. But in countries that have managed to achieve some degree of steadiness, low-cost African outsourcing is luring investors and jobs.
The numbers, although not totaled, are clearly tiny compared with the hundreds of thousands of U.S. and European jobs migrating to India, China, Malaysia and the Philippines. But where African outsourcing exists, it is huge.
In Ghana, Affiliated Computer Services of Texas has become one of the largest employers in the English-speaking West African country. At Accra, Ghana's capital, more than 1,700 employees process American health-insurance claims around the clock, working in shifts.
Senegal, a former French colony, is luring outsourcing of the francophone world.
The country's stability, low wages, and a stock of young, educated employees attracted Ndiaye's employer, the French-Senegalese partnership of Premium Contact Center International.
So did Senegal's infrastructure - a fiber-optic cable running from France gives the country telecommunications as good as any in Europe.
Not only that, French is one of Senegal's national languages, and the educated in Dakar speak both it and the local language of Wolof.
On the call center's work platform, the minimum educational requirement for operators is a college degree.
Six-hundred operators aged 20 to 25 work up to 40 hours a week - equipped by their employers with a French-sounding pseudonym and a carefully drilled French accent to raise the comfort levels of the customers they will be calling up.
Thanks to a generous loan from a West African development bank, and an operating cost that is 30 percent cheaper than in France, the call center will be more than doubling its staff to 700 this year, said Abdoulaye M'boup, the deputy managing director of the call center.
Eight hours a day earns a starting salary of $200 a week. Pay goes up to $500, plus benefits and bonuses, for the most productive.
Compared with the wage of $1,200 offered to their counterparts in France, it is not much. But in Senegal, the minimum wage is $85 a week.
Today, there are four call centers in Senegal - PCCI, Call Me, Access Value, and Center Value - all offering customer support and back-office services and primarily working for French companies.
The Associated Press
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