20,000 BPO JOBS GONE: JAMAICA’S LOW-HANGING FRUIT ECONOMY EXPOSED By Richard Hugh Blackford

For more than a decade, Jamaica's Business Process Outsourcing sector has been sold as one of the great success stories of the country's economic transformation. Thousands of young Jamaicans were employed. Office buildings sprang up in Kingston, Portmore and Montego Bay. Government ministers celebrated new operators and new employment numbers, while millions of dollars of public and development financing were committed to creating the infrastructure necessary to accommodate an expanding industry. But something has changed.Jamaica's Global Digital Services sector is shrinking; and the numbers are significant enough that Jamaicans ought to be asking some serious questions about what is happening.Government figures indicate that employment fell from approximately 62,000 two years ago to about 50,000 by March 2026. Industry representatives paint an even more troubling picture, putting current employment at roughly 40,000. Either way, thousands of jobs have disappeared. And at the same time the sector's estimated spending in Jamaica has also fallen dramatically, from approximately US$1 billion to US$780 million in a single year, a decline of US$220 million. That is not a minor adjustment. It represents hundreds of millions of US dollars no longer circulating through wages, rents, utilities, transportation, food, services and the wider Jamaican economy.

A 20,000-JOB QUESTION

There is another issue that deserves explanation. The Government had targeted 70,400 GDS jobs by March 2025. Instead, Government figures showed approximately 55,000. By March 2026, Government employment estimates had declined further to approximately 50,000. Yet Global Services Association of Jamaica President Yoni Epstein says the industry has been employing closer to 40,000 people. That is an extraordinary discrepancy. It begs the question of how does the Government count 50,000 people working in an industry whose own representative organization says the number is approximately 40,000? The difference may have a perfectly reasonable statistical explanation; different reporting periods, different definitions of the sector, or different methods of counting employees. Whatever the reason, somebody needs to provide that explanation.When an industry is this important to Jamaica's employment strategy, we should know with reasonable accuracy whether it employs 40,000 people or 50,000; as ten thousand Jamaicans cannot simply disappear inside a statistical footnote.

HURRICANE MELISSA CANNOT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

The Government has attributed the decline to several factors, including reshoring, geopolitical developments, technological change, the cost of doing business and Hurricane Melissa, which undoubtedly affected the industry.Montego Bay is an important BPO centre, and damage to electricity, telecommunications, transportation and workers' homes in western Jamaica would inevitably have disrupted operations. But Melissa cannot become a convenient explanation for a much larger structural problem. Industry leaders themselves are talking about rising operating costs, productivity problems, increasing international competition and the loss of business to competing destinations. In fact, Epstein has publicly acknowledged that some companies have left Jamaica while others have reduced their capacity. That statement deserves considerably more attention, because that is precisely the vulnerability I warned about more than a decade ago.

THE PROBLEM WAS BUILT INTO THE MODEL

When Jamaica began aggressively pursuing BPO investment, I argued that we needed to be careful about building an employment strategy around an industry whose fundamental attraction was comparatively inexpensive labour. BPO companies are not charities. They locate operations where they can obtain the combination of labour, skills, infrastructure, reliability and operating costs that allows them to serve their clients profitably. If another country can provide substantially the same service at a lower cost — or technology can perform part of that service without employing thousands of people — the calculation changes. Jamaica therefore competes not merely with another building in Montego Bay or Kingston; but with the Philippines, India, Latin America, Africa, other Caribbean countries and increasingly with automation itself. And capital is notoriously disloyal, going at all times to where the numbers make sense. The chickens may now be coming home to roost.

AI MAY NOT BE THE CULPRIT — BUT THE WORLD IS CHANGING

Interestingly, Epstein argues that artificial intelligence is not responsible for the approximately 20,000 jobs the industry says have disappeared- a distinction which is important. We should not blame AI for every job that disappears simply because AI happens to be the newest technological development. But neither should Jamaica misunderstand what is happening to the global industry.The traditional BPO model was heavily dependent upon selling human labour; thousands of people sitting at computers handling customer-service calls and relatively routine business processes. That model is changing as customers are increasingly demanding analytics, automation, AI-supported customer service and more sophisticated knowledge-processing capabilities. The competitive question is therefore no longer simply about how cheaply can Jamaica provide 1,000 call-centre workers? Increasingly it is about what sophisticated services can those 1,000 Jamaicans provide that cannot easily be duplicated somewhere else,  or automated? That requires a completely different national strategy.

WE FINANCED THE INFRASTRUCTURE — BUT DID WE BUILD THE PEOPLE?

Since 2012, the Development Bank of Jamaica has committed approximately US$92.66 million to the GDS sector and disbursed about US$90 million to 20 BPO ventures. Those projects represented approximately 1.18 million square feet of operating space and capacity for more than 27,000 jobs. The financing reportedly helped facilitate another US$152.72 million in private investment, which was a substantial investment. But perhaps Jamaica needs to ask whether we concentrated too heavily on constructing buildings in which foreign companies could employ Jamaicans and insufficiently on creating Jamaican companies capable of selling sophisticated services to the world. There is an enormous difference between creating workers and creating owners. At the same time, there is an equally important difference between attracting somebody else's investment and developing our own productive capacity.

JAMAICA'S LOW-HANGING-FRUIT ECONOMICS 

This brings us to the larger problem. For decades Jamaica has demonstrated an extraordinary appetite for low-hanging economic fruit which includes Tourism, Bauxite., BPOs, Foreign direct investment, and Remittances. Each has an important place in the economy, and for sure, the argument is not that Jamaica should abandon any of them. The problem arises when attracting somebody else's capital becomes a substitute for developing our own.We celebrate the foreign hotel company building another resort, and we celebrate another overseas BPO company employing 2,000 Jamaicans. We celebrate another foreign investor opening another operation, but where are the Jamaican-owned technology companies employing thousands of people internationally? Where are the Jamaican software companies? Where are our animation studios, digital-content companies, financial-technology businesses, engineering companies and intellectual-property enterprises? Where are the globally marketed Jamaican brands beyond the handful that emerged generations ago?Jamaica possesses enormous creative capital. Our music conquered the world; as did our athletes. Jamaica’s culture is recognized almost everywhere. Yet economically we continue behaving as though the principal asset Jamaicans have to sell is relatively inexpensive labour.

FROM BPO TO KNOWLEDGE OWNERSHIP

There is still an opportunity here. Jamaica should not respond to the decline of BPO by abandoning the global services industry. We should respond by climbing higher up its value chain. That means deliberately training Jamaicans for software development, cybersecurity, financial services, healthcare administration, animation, data analytics, AI supervision, digital marketing, intellectual-property development and other knowledge-process services. It means teaching entrepreneurship alongside employability. And it means creating financing mechanisms that allow Jamaicans to build companies rather than merely work inside companies somebody else owns.The objective should not simply be attracting another overseas company that promises 2,000 jobs. The objective should also be creating the environment in which a Jamaican entrepreneur can build a company that employs 2,000 people. That is a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

THE WARNING IS IN THE NUMBERS

Whether Jamaica's GDS workforce currently stands at 40,000 or 50,000, the direction is unmistakable. Employment has fallen, and companies have reduced capacity. Some businesses have migrated elsewhere, and in the process, local expenditure has declined by approximately US$220 million. Along with this, the Government's own employment targets have been missed by a considerable margin. Hurricane Melissa may have aggravated the situation, but a hurricane did not invent international competition. It did not invent reshoring. It did not create Jamaica's operating costs. And it certainly did not create the technological transformation now changing the global outsourcing industry as those forces were already there. The real lesson is considerably larger than BPO. The lesson is that Jamaica cannot build lasting prosperity indefinitely by pruning and picking low-hanging fruit. At some point we have to plant our own trees. We must educate and train Jamaicans not simply to provide labour for international capital, but to create intellectual property, build businesses, develop technology and own a greater share of the economic activity taking place on our soil. Otherwise, every time the international marketplace discovers a cheaper worker, a cheaper country or a cheaper technology, Jamaica will once again find itself asking the same question:

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