Wednesday 26th January 2011

The Kenya Vision 2030 aims at transforming Kenya into a rapidly industrializing and middle income country by 2030. The Kenyan Government is committed to providing an enabling business environment which will enhance private sector growth and competitiveness that will contribute to the country’s medium and long term objectives. To facilitate this, there is need to create formal engagement structures and partnerships to aid sharing of ideas between the Government and its various stakeholders.

With this in mind, a conference was organized by the Office of the Prime Minister in partnership with the World Bank Group. The conference, dubbed The Competitive Partnership Initiative (CPI) held at the Intercontinental Hotel intendeds to build upon two sets of initiatives that have been ongoing for the last two years; sector development initiatives and the public private dialogue. It also aims to sharpen the focus on addressing specific binding constraints and increasing investment generation efforts that are expected to achieve most impact in the short-mid-term.

The conference, graced by senior dignitaries in the public and private sector tackled issues hindering the growth of the BPO/ICT sector. Amongst them were Nicholas Nesbitt, CEO KenCall; Randeep Sudan, World Bank Group and Gaurav Gupta, Everest Group. They presented various ways in which partnerships between the government and private sector could be improved with the overall aim of transforming Kenya into a rapidly industrializing and middle income country by 2030; Select a sub sector for CPI and identify further analysis required by the selected sub sector.

Nicholas said “Kenya has a very big opportunity to grow in the BPO sector globally. The initiative has to come from our Kenyan Government in implementing marketing strategies to position Kenya as an outsourcing hub. It’s all about foreign entities buying into Kenyan companies for them to be able to forge a relationship with the local/domestic companies. This would increase our credibility and trustworthiness.”

Giving comments after the presentations, Gilda Odera, Chairperson,BPO/ITES Working Group, Office of the Prime Minister said: “It is important to create a balance and develop a balanced capacity in the sense of foreign and local companies so as to avoid collapsing.” “The government should work with the BPO/ICT to develop the outsourcing industry” she added.

The conference concluded with closing remarks from the Permanent Secretary Office of the Prime Minister. They indicated there would be a working group set up to develop targeted action plans to systematically remove constraints, prioritizing those that are expected to have the biggest impact on increased investment in the short term.

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