Outsourcing in Ghana : An Integrated Perspective

This paper delves into onshore outsourcing activities in Ghana and the impact of these activities on the overall value creation activities of organizations. It also provides an insight into the challenges faced by outsourcing organisations and their suppliers in the Ghanaian operational environment. The study adopts a quantitative research approach, using a structured questionnaire with a fivepoint Likert scale ranging from 1 = fully disagree to 5 = fully agree. The data was collected from organizations represented in the MBA and executive MBA programmes at the University of Ghana Business School in 2008. These included private and public-owned firms as well as Not-For-Profit organizations. Statistical analyses were performed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 16.0). We find that the respondent organizations are likely to engage in outsourcing if the net cost reductions that it affords them are positive and/or if the decision frees internal resources which could then be deployed on core activities. We however found no evidence that foreign organizations in the sample behave differently from their local counterparts with respect to the nature of locally outsourced products/services. Finally, both local and foreign out sourcers are more likely to opt for larger and/or foreign suppliers due to their relative resource advantages and delivery reliability. The data set could be expanded in subsequent studies to cover a larger sample size. The findings suggest that organizations located in Ghana (and, by extension, in other African countries) could leverage resources through outsourcing. Outsourcing decisions should therefore take on a more strategic posture in the planning regimes of organizations in Ghana and other African economies. Overall the study provides an integrated perspective to the outsourcing debate in Africa and contributes to the global outsourcing debate in general.