Accountants key to continent's progress

The accountancy profession plays a key role in the socio-economic development of Africa, and there is a correlation between the concentration and capacity of accountancy and finance professionals and the level of GDP or overall economic wellbeing. This was the message for the 1,200 finance professionals from across Africa who attended this year’s ACCA Africa Public Sector Conference.

New economic demands, including clean energy, digitisation and more accessible healthcare, dictate that governments be good custodians of public money and collaborate with the finance sector to deliver. In this effort, few public sector professionals have more influence than the accountant, whose skills and knowledge must be equal to these new demands.

The virtual conference, held in March, focused on three key areas: the state of the profession in Africa; building a professional public finance function for the future; and how government institutions can empower the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement.

New learning strategies

A panel session on the state of the profession in Africa discussed skill shortages facing the sector, including emerging areas such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) and technology, and highlighted priority actions for various stakeholders groups (see panel ‘Conference calls to action’). Professional accountancy organisations (PAOs) need to revise their learning strategies to meet these new demands, agreed the panel, which included Hikmet Abdella, director general of the Accounting and Auditing Board of Ethiopia; Agnes Macaulay FCCA, accountant general, The Gambia; and Iheanyi Odinakachi Anyahara, director, Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria.

Accountants in Africa want to work with harmonised standards, so countries that are currently using their own must move towards using international standards. As one panellist said, harmonised standards help with comparability and instil confidence among stakeholders, as well as encouraging foreign direct investment and improving the level of trust in African governments.

Panellists agreed that governance and ethics training should be mandatory for accountants in the public sector. Standards are nothing without ethics, said one. If PAOs make delivering ethics education a priority, then the culture will follow, they concluded.

The right people

In the discussion on building a professional public finance function, panellists noted that this will bring benefits at individual, government and whole-economy levels. One of the key benefits would be that governments would have the right people to help them drive their agenda, as noted by panellists Vonani Chauke, deputy auditor general, South Africa; Ugandan public financial management expert Belinda Annette Komuntale; and Evans Mulera, CEO, African Professionalisation Initiative, based in Kenya; who spoke alongside Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah FCCA, executive director at Ghana’s Economic and Organised Crime Office, and Kamal Raj Sadien FCCA, licensed auditor and senior accountant in Mauritius.

Alex Metcalfe, ACCA’s head of public sector policy, reported on ACCA’s research into talent trends in the public sector and identified five key efforts on the journey to full professionalisation of finance functions: political will; the right structures to support and govern professionals; a gap analysis to understand what skills are lacking; an adoption and implementation period; and continuous development and improvement.

Panellists also noted that professionalisation had important implications for ethical behaviour in the public sector. One panel member said that government agencies must develop and reinforce the ethical code of conduct among employees at every opportunity – not just at recruitment and orientation, but at monthly meetings and quarterly or half-yearly reviews – since it is a hallmark and a mainstay of the profession in the fight against bribery and corruption.

Trade focus

In terms of empowering the AfCFTA agreement, panellists Bockarie Kalokoh, deputy minister of finance, Sierra Leone; Taiwo Oyedele FCCA, fiscal policy partner and Africa tax leader, PwC; and Alta Prinsloo, CEO, PanAfrican Federation of Accountants (PAFA) discussed a joint report from ACCA and PAFA, which identified barriers to intra-continental trade and made recommendations for the profession to grow its role in empowering such trade.

Again, the report noted that the profession needs to increase its proficiency in technology if it is to take advantage of opportunities. It also found that the profession must ‘increase its advocacy for and dialogue about the development of sustainable and feasible trade and finance policies at the national level to improve country-by-country operationalisation of the AfCFTA’.

Panellists agreed that since Africa is the single largest market for trade, both competition and integration need to increase. Each described how their region or sector was grasping the opportunity. One said that finance professionals were super-connectors across ecosystems and that they were involved in ensuring that African accountants’ voices were being heard in the development of international sustainability standards.

Another pointed out that AfCFTA is a laudable initiative, but that the African continent needed to make significant progress to be at the level of the European Union. This would require capacity-building, the leveraging of global networks for knowledge-sharing, and collaborating across public and private sector organisations to circumvent impediments to intra-continental trade.

While the conference highlighted the importance of accountants in driving sustainable growth across Africa’s economies, it also served as a warning that, as the profession globally experiences significant and rapid change, those working in the African continent must ensure that they are not left behind.