Belgium companies are so keen to take in South African IT students that they are moving into the country in order to access them.
Jan Rombouts, executive director of ICT training NGO the Belgium Campus, says its incubator project for Belgium businesses is taking off exponentially due to this trend.
"We already have 14 Belgium companies that have applied for a place in our incubator programme and we are now building more infrastructure so we can house a total of 18 companies at the end of the day," he says.
The Belgium Campus has bilateral agreements with universities and business in Belgium, which allows it to place all its IT graduates for a year's practical training overseas.
Rombouts says an increasing number of companies wanted to keep their trainees and when they learned they couldn't do this, decided to move into SA in order to employ those workers here.
"A software developer can even work from an island as long as they have a computer and a data line," explains Rombouts.
This is how the incubator process started and it is run under the auspices of a Belgium business club called BCZA.
Some of the main reasons put forward by the BCZA for focusing on SA is the country's relatively strong economy, the economic boost anticipated from the 2010 World Cup, and the fact the country lies in the same time zone as Europe.
Belgium needs about 14 000 software developers and Rombouts says the demand for skills is so high that his campus alone cannot keep up with it.
It has, therefore, recently partnered with the Tshwane University of Technology and the University of Cape Town IT departments to also place their top students with Belgium companies.
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