NAIROBI

Susan Mina, a Kenyan who has never stepped foot out of Africa, speaks English like the haughtiest of Brits. 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 and that is not at all helpful as she tries to bolster 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 sat somewhere at home in the United Kingdom. She sat near the Nairobi airport 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?"

Controlling one's Swahili is just one of the challenges that Kenyans are facing as they play catch-up in an industry that India and other developing countries have already turned into major job generators.

Kenya's regular phone lines, for instance, are so abysmal that the founders of KenCall had to go through the cumbersome process of getting government approval to use a costly satellite hook-up. Even more dollars were burned on an elaborate generator system designed to keep KenCall's computer screens running during Nairobi's frequent power outages.

"Africa needs to raise its game," said Russell Southwood, who publishes a newsletter on telecommunications in Africa at www.balancingact-africa.com. "It needs to show the world that it can do more than pick minerals out of the ground and grow fruits and vegetables."

After looking on for years as Asia cashed in on the outsourcing boom, Africa is now aggressively seeking its piece of the action.

KenCall, for one, is eager to lure business from Western companies that want cheap labor - but educated cheap labor like Mina, who has a university degree but works for less than a fast-food cashier would make in the United States.

Although just a tiny entrant in the call-center market, KenCall has enough initial clients to keep 200 telephone operators busy.

Some of the Kenyan sales agents dial up Britons and urge them to save money on their cellphones. Others dial up Americans and ask if they are interested in refinancing their home mortgage.

Without knowing it, some Americans even dial up Kenya, responding to advertisements offering low-income grants or job assistance.

Datamonitor, a consulting firm that follows outsourcing, estimates that there are 54,000 call center jobs in the most advanced countries in Africa, out of a total of six million worldwide. That figure includes only South Africa and the countries of North Africa, not emerging call centers in places like Ghana and Kenya.

"There's a lot of potential in Africa," said Peter Ryan, an analyst at Datamonitor. "India, the Philippines and Canada are relatively mature, and that means wages and real estate are higher. So companies are asking, 'Are there other locations?"'

South Africa is far ahead of the rest of the continent, with an estimated 500 call-center operations employing about 31,000 people. South Africa boasts that its workers' accents are neutral enough to fool English speakers in other parts of the world. And it shares the same time zones with parts of Europe.

Ghana, which makes similar claims about its population's understandable English, has lured Affiliated Computer Services, an outsourcing company based in Dallas that now employs about 2,000 Ghanaians to process health forms for Aetna and other insurers.

With vast populations of French speakers, Africa is working to claim that sector of the market as well. French-language call centers are operating in Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia and Madagascar, all of them dialing up Parisians and pretending to be just down the "rue."

Much of the outsourcing in Africa is in telemarketing, which is less profitable than processing medical forms or acting as the customer service department of an overseas corporation. But making cold calls is considered an entree to the highly competitive industry.

"The market for this is huge," said Nicholas Nesbitt, chief executive of KenCall. "Any job that is being done that doesn't require face-to-face contact can be outsourced. And why not to Kenya?"

Besides what Nesbitt calls Kenyans' "pleasant Anglicized accent," the country offers an advantage that stems from its tepid economic growth over the years. Many of its college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and many are eager to dial around the world for a paycheck that would be considered meager in the United States - about $4,500 a year, including performance bonuses. That income is well above that of the average person in Kenya, where subsistence farming is the most common job.

Some of KenCall's agents must change their names on the job, trading Wanjira for Wendy, for instance. And they receive nonstop feedback from supervisors on their accents, their sales pitches and their ability to think on their feet.

One frequent issue is the Kenyan habit of letting out a little grunt when someone else is talking, which is supposed to reassure the speakers that their words are being heard. Some agents grow alarmed if the person on the other end of the line is quiet and ask with alarm: "Hello? Hello? Are you there?"

Some call center workers have traveled the world and picked up their accents in the process. For others, KenCall is their virtual travel. Mina, for instance, visualizes herself sitting in the living rooms of the foreigners she is talking to over the phone.

And even without leaving Nairobi, she and other agents are learning about cultural differences. Brits, the agents say, are far more likely to chat extensively with a telemarketer even if they have no interest in the product. Americans are a different story. They are abrupt, the Kenyans say, and far more likely to erupt into rage.