ITIDA launches electronic portal to support outsourcing industry in April

We aim to promote Egypt as a regional axis of call centres, says EITESAL head

Source: Daily News Egypt   |    By: Mohamed Alaa El-Din  

Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) will launch a new initiative in cooperation with the Egyptian Information, Telecommunications, Electronics, and Software Alliance (EITESAL) to help the companies, and workers in the sector of call centres and the outsourcing industry, Vice President of ITIDA Ehab Mostafa said.

The initiative seeks to achieve this through training the companies and their workers, and granting them certificates of compliance with COPC standards.

Egyptian IT exports in the form of services such as outsourcing, call centres, and products such as software amounted to about USD 1.5 billion by the end of 2015.

Mostafa expected Egypt to register growth rates ranging between 10% and 12% in the upcoming few years in the field of outsourcing and exporting IT services. ITIDA, in cooperation with civil society organisations, plans to provide aid to companies for exports, in addition to promoting Egyptian companies in Gulf countries, Africa, some European countries, the US, and the Asian markets, especially as there are promising opportunities there.

Head of the Call Centres Division at EITESAL, Sameh Montaser said there are ~50,000 employees in this industry. Egypt has several advantages in comparison with its competitors, most prominently the availability of trained and qualified human resources, the required infrastructure, language proficiency, and the special geographic location in the middle of the world’s continents. This is in addition the fact that more than 17 marine cables passing through it.
Montaser said the Egyptian Outsourcing Gate will be launched in cooperation with ITIDA in April 2016. The gate aims to promote Egypt’s capabilities and competitive advantages abroad. It will provide data about the available sources in the call centres sector by promoting Egypt’s vision abroad as the regional axis of outsourcing. That is in addition to working on developing the suggested ideas in the field of communications.