Outsourcing - The transfer of responsibility for operating an organization's activities, processes, or functions to an external service provider, usually involving the transfer of people, assets or systems.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)- A form of outsourcing that involves contacting of the operations and responsibilities of specific business functions or processes to a third party service.

Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) - a form of outsourcing in which knowledge-related and information related work is carried out by workers in a different company, or by a subsidiary of the same organization.

Off-shoring - The transfer of activities, processes or functions to facilities in a low cost country, which may be owned by the organization or an external service provider.

Near-shoring - Same as off-shoring, just closer usually lower risk.

In-shoring - The opposite of off-shoring, in-shoring still seeks to make cost savings through looking at different, but domestically rather than a separate country.

Multi-sourcing - Outsourcing towards third party providers.

Shared Services - The bringing together of support activities, usually through centralization, into a customer oriented entity which provides services to the organization.

Captive Service - BPO, where an organisation will usually wholly owned subsidiary rather than a third-party vendor.

Core activities - Essential services that differentiate an organization lead to profit generation and where investment is focused.

Non-core - Activities that could be sourced internally or through a third party service provider.

Home-shoring - The transfer of service industry employment from offices to home based employees with appropriate phone/internet services.

Best-shoring - The best location for a company to move its manufacturing IT or business process.

Selling back towers is a new trend in the continent. Essentially operators sell off their towers to companies like (American Towers) http://www.americantower.com/atcweb and (Helios Towers) http://www.heliostowers.com/ and then lease them back - it ceases to be their responsibility to maintain and manage them and the tower operator can also lease the same tower to competing operators thus lowering the cost for each operator. This is just another form of infrastructure sharing and actually helps the environment to become less cluttered. One tower can house BTS or microwave dishes for various operators. Its happened in Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

Another level of oursourcing is to do with the actual network - way back Zain did this in Kenya and Nigeria - handing over management of its network to Nokia Siemens Networks - with that, they also migrated the staff who looked after the network who became employed by NSN - thus making for a leaner operation.