MANILA, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ordered the allocation of 350 million (7.9 million U.S. dollars) official fund for training 70,000 call center workers seeking jobs in the country's business outsourcing industry, reported the official Philippines News Agency Wednesday.

    Arroyo made the decision at a launching ceremony for the book "Offshoring and Outsourcing Philippines: Roadmap 2010" by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) in Makati City Monday.

    By allocating the fund, Arroyo intended to reward a training program started last year with a scholarship named after herself, which has trained 37,300 call center workers, including medical transcriptionists and software developers, with half of the trainees having found jobs, said the report.

    The business process outsourcing sector is considered one of the fastest growing industry in the country. In less than 10 years, it has provided jobs to 235,000 Filipinos and earned 3.3 billion U.S. dollars in revenues, contributing roughly 2 percent to the gross domestic product.

    Benefiting from English fluency of its people, the Philippines is now one of the top destinations for offshoring and outsourcing services in the world, enjoying a 5 percent share of the global market.

    BPAP expects a higher growth for the outsourcing sector in the next couple of years by aiming to capture 10 percent of the global market and quadrupling revenues to 13 billion U.S. dollars.

    This will also create 600,000 more jobs for Filipinos and increasing the total direct employment in outsourcing industry to 900,000, according to BPAP.