Three thousand jobs have been created in the busi­ness process outsourcing sector during the COV­ID-19 pandemic.

This was confirmed by Attorney–General and Minister for Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.

“As a Government, our objective has always been to di­versify the economy we cannot just depend on one or two things,” he said.

“One area that’s growing in the services sector is where we have things like call centres or data processing that’s done, in fact they grew 3000 jobs during the COVID period. Some of these businesses are actually located in Nadi.”

Mr Sayed –Khaiyum made these comments during con­sultations for the revised 2021-2022 National Budget at the Nadi Civic Centre.

“These are essentially where people are answering phone calls from Australia in Fiji, so for example, a bank that may have a customer helpline and an Australian is calling the bank in Sydney or in fact the call comes to Fiji,” he said

“The reason why that has actually happened is a lot of the Australians who have their BPOs (business process out­sourcing) out in the Philippines or India wanted to bring it closer to their homes so they bring it to Fiji because we’ve got competitive rates, telecommunication is pretty good.”

He said a study conducted showed that 100,000 jobs could be created in the BPO sector in the next 10 years

“We’ve given $300,000 grant to the BPO council so it can go and market Fiji, we have a company like Telstra that is buying Digicel; Telstra is an Australian company that obviously recognises Fiji as a stable environment to come into,” he said

“We have people here not just answering phone calls, but also doing debt management, bookkeeping, all sorts of things that they are doing for business overseas which is being done in Fiji

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