Outline of Programme 7: A BPO programme aimed at unemployed youth, providing training in Call Centre Management.

Relating to Programmes 6 and 7:
ICT/BPO Intervention at the Moses Kotane Institute - A New KZN-DED Initiative

The KZNDED is in the process of establishing two "Fountainhead" Centres of Sectoral Excellence, to be housed within the recently launched Moses Kotane Institute.
To foster and leapfrog ICT human capacity building in KwaZulu-Natal, to mitigate the skills' shortage being faced by the industry, and to facilitate growth and reduce unemployment - the Business Process Outsourcing Centre, and a new Software Engineering Institute will train 10 000 candidates over the next five years.

These two Centres of Sectoral excellence reflect a holistic and developmental approach to e-skills development and ensure effective participation by corporate and other partners. The Centres will encourage thought leadership in KZN, and build on existing ICT initiatives in the province through multi-stakeholder partnerships and a distributed educational model involving institutional capacity at a regional and local level.
It is necessary to create a new form of collaboration that involves the full range of actors in the public and private sectors. These multi-stakeholder partnerships offer the potential to bridge the 'parallel universes' of industry-based education and government supported education.

NIIT will initiate the first multi-stakeholder partnership with the Moses Kotane Institute, and other partnerships will evolve as the project rolls out. NIIT have the proven ability to execute large projects of this nature, having successfully executed similar large projects in China, India and the United States. They bring with them the unique opportunity for 'graduates' from the Software Engineering and BPO interventions to participate in work-based training in India, as part of the holistic approach to education and training in the ICT sector. The internship period will be for a minimum of 6 months to one year, and will be funded by the CII (Confederation of Indian Industries), NIIT and other funders.

NIIT will be taking up premises with the Moses Kotane Institue at Derby Downs in University Rd in Westville from May 2009.