Jamaica’s BPO sector on the rebound
Alockdown between April and July resulted in a dramatic decline in the employment levels within the local business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, however president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ), Gloria Henry, said the sector has been rebounding since August to the extent that it now employs more than 39,000 Jamaicans.
“In the Montego Bay Free Zone, where I am located, we have grown by 12.77 per cent since August and our information technology (IT) outsourcing portfolio is looking to grow by 66 per cent next year,” said Henry as she noted that the industry is trying to reach 40,000 employees by the end of the year.
Henry was speaking at a webinar organised by the GSAJ and the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) last week. It was held under the theme ‘Drawing the curtain on 2020: Maintaining the protocols’.
Although more than 50 per cent of the BPO workforce is now working from home, operators have spent between
US$400,000 and US$2 million in maintaining COVID-19 protocols, installing barriers to ensure social distancing and providing extra transportation services during curfews.
Henry pointed out that BPO industry leaders began 2020 with a great deal of enthusiasm and were ready to implement several projects in a number of areas to move the sector towards 50,000 employees, but COVID-19 derailed those efforts.
“We have navigated uncertainty very well and now with resilience we are advancing towards the future,” declared Henry.
The sector currently has five new sites scheduled for launch within the first quarter of 2021.
President of the PSOJ and chief executive officer of the JMMB Group, Keith Duncan, used the webinar to commend the sector for the contribution it has made in providing employment for thousands of Jamaicans.
“The BPO industry has done extremely well, as a fairly young industry, contributing more than US$780 million of earnings to Jamaica and 43,000 thousand employees at the end of 2019, and there is so much more room and there is so much to grow,” said Duncan, who pointed to the fact that only 1.18 million Jamaicans make up the employed labour force.
The PSOJ head underscored that improving the country’s mobile and fixed broadband is going to be necessary going forward.
“For the BPO industry and many businesses, it is required that we have a proper infrastructure, that we have Internet penetration connectivity and speed, so therefore, this is an area that we are going to have to focus on and the prime minister has indicated that this is going to be a significant area of focus for us as a country to roll out that infrastructure to see that we are now connected,” said Duncan.
He noted that human capital development, digitisation and crime continue to affect labour productivity and projected that with the impact of the pandemic, the economy will not return to PRE-COVID-19 levels until somewhere around 2023/24.
Describing the pandemic as the “ugly side of globalisation”, dean of the Faculty of Sport at The University of the West Indies, Dr Akshai Mansingh, said the creation of vaccines has created some hope but encouraged Jamaicans to still maintain the current COVID-19 protocols.
“Small developing nations like [Jamaica] are not going to see those vaccines in a hurry, and so therefore the mantra must remain, social distancing, mask-wearing, sanitisation and education,” he said.
“What we’ve had in 2020 is what I call a global reset; there are now new possibilities with home stay, homework, e-technology, e-meetings, even the approach to education has changed,” said Mansingh.