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RioVida Africa
$50 Billion Investment to increase telecom capabilities for Africa
In Kigali, the GSM Association announced that its industry members planned to invest USD 50 billion between 2008 and 2012 in networks in Africa, covering 90 per cent of the population. The Association announced in May 2008 that the number of mobile connections in Africa has risen 70 million in the past 12 months to 282 million.
Mr Jeremy Rose, Chairman, International Development Initiatives, Global VSAT Forum (GVF), announced that the global satellite communications sector plans to double the number of earth station terminals operating in the region by 2012 to cater to more than 1 billion Africans located in under-served rural and urban areas throughout the continent. To support this growth, more than 20 satellites will be brought into service to connect Africa during the next five years.
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré explained the UN Millennium Development Goals "Seven years before the 2015 target for achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, we need to be bold. We need to devise the strategies that will enable us to achieve these goals. Information and communication technologies have a crucial role to play in achieving these goals, for example, through e-education e-agriculture and e-health." Dr Touré added that African countries need modern, reliable broadband infrastructure in order to create jobs for economic growth. "Investment, not charity, is the solution for Africa’s development!"
As Africa's educational system improves an entire continent of affordable workers will be created that eventually can fill jobs that have moved to India, Mexico and the Philippine fill now. As tech support wages increase in India it often is charged out for $20 per hour new labor markets are urgently needed. Computer literacy and broadband access is important to garner these international jobs.
BP and Accenture work together to distribute their labor forces across the globe to fight inflation
According to Russell Taruscio, finance control and accounting procurement director for BP, the benefits of the company's evolving operating model for global sourcing have been the continued pursuit of cost advantages but also the ability to secure skilled resources with greater staffing flexibility, enabling management to focus on more strategic issues.
"Through our pursuit of outsourcing and global sourcing," Taruscio says, "we have been able to beat inflation and hold our transactional accounting costs steady over a number of years. But we also see demand management as a significant benefit. A shared services function only gets you so far, because with an internal resource, you just make the call and someone is obligated to provide the service. With outsourcing, the conversation becomes more economic: How fast do we need the services, and how much will it cost? That line of questioning tends to bring valuable rigor to the table."
Taruscio also sees a number of important intangible benefits emerging from BP's evolving operating model for the global sourcing of its transactional accounting capabilities. Reliance on a global team that includes outsourcing service providers means the organization has access to highly motivated and highly skilled resources: people who are dedicated to delivering services that meet service delivery agreements at the heart of the way they do business.
"During all of our merger and acquisition activity over the past decade or so," Taruscio says, "we had the benefit of [outsourcing partners] who could focus on merging the transaction side of the accounting function, while BP people were free to focus on the merging of the business activity." That readily available expertise has freed up BP's management time to work on the things that help deliver value for the company, he adds. "And it also gives us a great deal of organizational flexibility. We can look to service providers to add or reduce the size of a staff as required."
In the middle of the 1990s, outsourcing at BP grew significantly. The company outsourced the accounting services for its exploration and production (E&P) and refining and marketing businesses in the lower 48 US states, as well as its Alaskan E&P business and its European retail joint venture.
Following the BP and Amoco megamerger and the company's acquisition of Arco and Castrol, BP outsourced significantly more work—work that previously had been done in accounting centers both in the United States and Canada.
