BUT THERE'S HOPE:

Outsourcing comes to Africa, bringing jobs (NAFI DIOUF, 7/08/04, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

On the job, she's Dominique Mercier - nattering in lilting French, working her headset eight hours a day, and hawking telephone services to Europeans.

Come day's end, the accent drops, and Dominique's true identity stands revealed: Fatou Ndiaye, 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," says Ndiaye, now a supervisor watching over a dozen operators wearing Islamic head scarves, West African robes or Western clothes.

The women chatter away in the finest - faked - Parisian accents to consumers in France, 3,700 miles to the north.

"Now, I can tell you, it's pure thrill," Ndiaye says at her work station, a cherished cubicle 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 are managing to get, or hold, it together, low-cost African outsourcing is luring investors and jobs.

The numbers, although not totaled, are clearly tiny compared to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. and European jobs migrating to India, China, Malaysia and the Philippines. Thus far, outsourcing is less an issue in France than in the United States, because only 2 percent of French jobs are outsourced.

But where outsourcing exists in Africa, it's huge.

In twenty years they'll have China's manufacturing jobs.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2004 9:47 AM