Ethiopian capable BPO talent pool is deep and immense. Gold mine for early prospectors.
Last week, we hosted our first Curiosity Lab event at the US Embassy Satchmo center. BPO founders, business development professionals, consultancy firm founders, BPO employees in tech and customer support and students were among the guests.
Curiosity Lab is a curiosity of BICO extended to the BPO ecosystem, it is designed for BICO and its guests to ask questions to analyze cases to form bridges and as a result build a robust BPO industry here in Ethiopia. People who are either building, working in, or circling the BPO space, and a shared question: what does outsourcing really look like in Ethiopia, beyond the headlines and assumptions?
Curiosity Lab was created because at BICO we believe in asking the position of a person, a company and a country to understand and offer the service better. Most conversations around BPO in Ethiopia are either overly optimistic or unnecessarily dismissive. On one end, Ethiopia is presented as the “next big thing” without context. On the other, it's written off entirely because of infrastructure, policy friction, or unfamiliarity. Neither view helps founders or skilled professionals make informed decisions.
The presentation by BICO to start the conversation, started by introducing BICO and Curiosity Lab why the event is designed, we talked about the global BPO market, where demand actually comes from, and why the U.S. alone accounts for the majority of it. We briefly looked at how the Philippines and what they have as winning points and why they were able to generate about $29 Bill in 2022 to comparison Ethiopian gross foreign currency earned the same year is right about $23 Bill which confirms the Ethiopian government premise to consider BPO one of the strategic sector to boast foreign currency but there is work to do, as a government to create visibility and infrastructure.
Ethiopia's position in the BPO ecosystem is unusual. The talent is real. The workforce is young. The cost advantage is undeniable. English neutrality is stronger than many assume. And yet, the country is still largely invisible in global outsourcing conversations. That gap between capability and visibility is where most of the opportunity lies.
What became clear during the discussion is that many of the so-called “challenges” in Ethiopian BPO are actually unsolved problems waiting for entrepreneurs. Infrastructure gaps invite innovation in redundancy and reliability. Limited global exposure creates space for marketing, brokerage, and trust-building platforms. Compliance confusion opens room for specialized training, tooling, and advisory services. Even the fragmentation of small BPO operators points to the need for aggregation, standards, and shared market access.
Curiosity Lab wasn't about selling Ethiopia as perfect. It was about being honest about where we are, while being intentional about where we could go. At BICO, that's the lens we operate from. We don't believe Ethiopia needs hype. It needs translation between local capability and global expectation, between skilled workers and real demand, between ambition and execution. Curiosity Lab is where those translations begin.