Building an industry

Luke Mills (33) is executive director of CallingtheCape. He completed a BA with honours in French and Russian, and literature at Oxford University in 1994. A career as an investment banker and financial analyst followed, after which he went travelling for two years. He returned to the UK where he ran an Internet and property business for a few years. In 2003 he moved to Cape Town and organised conferences. Luke started CallingtheCape, a non-profit organisation, to create jobs in the contact centre and business process outsourcing industry by encouraging international companies to locate and build call centres in Cape Town. The industry has created more than 5 000 jobs in the last two years. CallingtheCape has directly trained and assisted about 300 young people to find work in this field.