DAVAO CITY – The 700 internet cafés in the city are eyed to be utilized as service centers for job recruitment of business processing outsourcing (BPO) .
So far, only 400 of them could be harnessed for this activity, said lawyer Samuel Matunog, president of the Information and Communications Technology – Davao Industry Development (ICT-DID), He said the 400 cafes are the ones still active.
“We are thinking that maybe we can qualify these internet cafés to farm out jobs for the unemployed especially those from rural and urban poor communities that we usually thought of them as not part of ICT community,” he said.
He said the internet cafés will be transformed as service delivery centers and as a work space for the workers.
“After the conversion of internet cafés into service centers there will be training for the owners of the cafés for them to be able to handle BPO services and also to train their clients after,” Matunog said.
He said he was glad that the city’s Information and Communications Technology Office (ICTO) spearheaded this project and already trained and developed service centers where unemployed sectors are tapped to be part of the ICT industry.
This will help maximize the operators of internet cafés to generate jobs for the communities near them, he said.
Part of the training that Matunog mentioned is content-handling for the government’s database.
Industry leaders are looking forward to jobs which could be done outside City Hall to the internet cafés or barangay halls.
“These are simple tasks but someone could earn with minimum wage,” he added.
There are problems expected to arise though, during the preliminary implementation of the impact-sourcing in the city. Matunog said that most of the workers are not familiar with the tasks that they are doing, “therefore there must be more trainings to be done.”
He admitted that the challenge is the training part.
“It will take longer time [for the training] given that the targets are from the unemployed and retired sectors from urban poor up including Indigenous People in the rural areas who are under-educated people in terms of knowledge in ICT.”
Matunog’s group is looking forward in generating 600 trained workers from unemployed sectors.
He said that the local government, through the city’s Information and Communications Technology Office (ICTO), is already giving its support by spearheading in the training provided for the target sector.
This project is part of the 6th SummIT which was held in the city last October 24 wherein part of the discussion is the utilization of impact-sourcing outside Metro Manila “as a tool for economic development of the least-developed communities and to connect them to the global economy”.
According to Monchito Ibrahim, deputy executive director on eBusiness of Department of Science and Techonology – Information and Communications Technology Office (DOST-ICTO), impact-sourcing could be defined into two models:
“First is people doing BPO jobs at home and second is partnership between the large BPO companies and small-local BPO companies for them to re-outsource some of the projects that the larger companies are doing,”.
“Instead of the big companies investing in the regions, the work will be given to the small business present in the region,” Monchito said.
He added that it would definitely have a “big impact in the region” especially that, according to him, “Davao is one of the biggest players in the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) sector.”
The said conference was attended by about a hundred ICT experts from Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), ICT practitioners, academe, and students under the ICT programs. (davaotoday.com)
