ADB vows financial assistance for BPO manpower development

CEBU, Philippines – Asian Development Bank (ADB) vowed to continue supporting Cebu's Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry by extending financial assistance for the establishment of an educational institution solely intended to develop quality manpower for the industry.

ADB Philippines Country Director Neeraj Jain said there is no educational facility in Cebu or anywhere in the Visayas that offers courses that could help strengthen the BPO sector such as software-development, knowledge outsourcing, legal services, and others.

Aside from its keenness to fund infrastructure development projects in both public and private sectors, Jain said ADB is also willing to fund projects that would support the development of manpower supply through an educational facility.

He added that Cebu has only been known to attract the lower level BPO investments such as voice services and it has yet to capture the high-value BPO services.

What the region needs is a good educational institution that will produce good and employable graduates for the higher-value BPO services, such as good programmers, software developers, and others.

According to Jain, Cebu or the Philippines for instance is 12 hours ahead of New York, companies there with legal concerns are now embracing the trend of outsourcing legal processing in other countries, and the time proximity between New York and the Philippines is just perfect.

"Legal outsourcers in the Philippines can do the job, while their clients in the US are sleeping," Jain said adding that this is the beauty of outsourcing that US clients are seeing, aside from paying lesser professional fees compared to hiring attorneys or legal consultants in the US.

Education issues in the Visayas or in Cebu should be given solution, Jain said and that this is part of the ADB's priority list that will gain support from the US$3.5 billion to US$4 billion development support for the Philippines, starting 2011.

ADB is doing a comprehensive medium-term Philippine development plan which will be implemented by 2011 under the US$3.5 billion to US$4 billion financial support for the Philippines starting next year.

Prior to the implementation of the medium-term plan, ADB is doing an eight-month consultation, and comprehensive market study for the Philippines, finding out the priority sectors that need to be given attention and should be given the developmental budget.

"We are going across the country in the next six to eight months to draw out our systematic assessment, and hire Filipino minds to help us analyze why the Philippines, for instance, did not grow as fast as its neighboring countries like Thailand, China," Jain said. (THE FREEMAN)