In New York Tickets, Ghana Sees Orderly City

In downtown Accra, the capital of Ghana, workers are employed by Data Management Internationale to punch in information from tickets served by New York City police officers. These data entry jobs, which have a constant flow of applicants though available positions are unpublicized, pay three times the Ghanaian minimum wage and more than twice the average per capita income. Data Management is a Delaware-based information technology firm hired by New York City to maintain a database of environmental violation tickets. Before Data Management, the same job was done by workers in India and Mexico employed by a firm in Michigan. While it is increasingly common for major cities to outsource their data to private companies, some New York officials were unaware that the work was done outside the U.S. While most Ghanaians speak English, the problem workers at Data Management face is reading the police officers scrawl and familiarizing themselves with the map of New York City. However, the Ghanaians may soon not have to worry about these challenges. Fear that American jobs are being lost to foreign outsourcing may bring the data entry jobs to the U.S. But the Ghanaians won’t lose their job since Data Management plans to expand its operations in Africa. Data Management chose to set up offices in Ghana because the country is safe, democratic, and has been stable for twenty years. Five years ago there were no internet cafes in Accra, now there are over 250. Labor is also cheaper in Ghana than the U.S. – YaleGlobal