**Author details**

*Outsourcing and Offshoring*

outsourcing a better alternative.

trailed to their own situation.

**Acknowledgements**

and constructive comments.

offshoring-outsourcing offers a better alternative.

1.**Skills:** No nation can have all the skills needed to sustain its population, especially in the developing economies. In countries where skills are available, they are expensive to recall offshore businesses. During the pandemic, South Africa had to depend on Penlon skills to get ventilator rights. It took more than six weeks for South Africa to find a "peep valve" manufacturer, a vital component in ventilators. Besides, in the race to find the coronavirus vaccine, most countries must depend on offshore-outsource business to access the vaccine.

2.**Air pollution:** If countries are to practice onshore, their air pollution is expected to become worse, especially in countries that depend on unrenewable resources. Air pollution is responsible for 4.2–7.0 million premature deaths every year, and it costs \$4.6 trillion per year; this number is three times compared to current COVID-19 deaths. Also, production of nitrous gases and particulate matter particles will increase upon onshoring. Particulate matter elevates cancer, coughing, eye diseases, among others. Such costs make offshoring-

3.**Carbon dioxide:** Carbon dioxide is one of the leading causes of global warming and climate change. Today China contributes 28% of total CO2 emission (10.06 GT), mainly due to onshoring. Such emission has increased flooding in the region and has affected farming in a sector that contributes over 10% of China's Gross domestic product (GDP). If developing countries that depend on agriculture are to practice onshoring, the cost will be too high—thus practising

4.**Livelihood:** Offshore-outsource is the bedrock for economic activities that can improve livelihoods and the GDP for countries that offer the business activities for multinationals but keeping the lights on can spiral the COVID-19 cases. However, turning off offshore-outsource activities to combat the upsurge of Covid-19 leads to job loss, economy plunge, livelihood loss, and rise of other healthcare issues induced by poverty, starvation, and mental health. Thus, countries must find an offshore-outsource onshore balancing point that is

5.**Demand for medical supplies:** As governments and industries increase manufacturing to meet the rising global demand of especially medical supplies to avoid the severe and mounting disruption to the worldwide supply, offshoring/ outsourcing and onshoring models will have to be revised to suit the context

We gratefully acknowledge Retha Burger for her suggestions and language editing. We also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thorough review

while meeting the demand caused by immobility pandemics.

**112**

George William Kajjumba1 \*, Oluka Pross Nagitta<sup>2</sup> , Faisal A. Osra<sup>3</sup> and Marcia Mkansi4

1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

2 Department of Economics and Managerial Sciences, Uganda Management Institute, Kampala, Uganda

3 Department of Civil Engineering, Umm AlQura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

4 Department of Operations Management, University of South Africa, Preller St, Muckleneuk, Pretoria, South Africa

\*Address all correspondence to: gwkajjumba@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
