I want to welcome all of you back from the exams, I had no papers myself but I could still feel the pressure. This time round, I felt I should share with you a little about my home land, Uganda.
Uganda (Pearl of Africa) is a small beautiful country in Eastern Africa. Like many other countries, accountants are greatly respected professionals and you shall find many ACCA students, affiliates and members working for large corporations, Multinationals, International Non-governmental organizations and Government.
However, there are very many hard working small scale business people……"and here we mean really small scale." These small businesses may be having a turnover of approximately USD12, 000 per year. They certainly cannot afford the services of professional accountants or even semi-professional ones. They often keep incomplete records if they keep any records at all. However, these small businesses form one of the major bases of our economy and they provide a livelihood to a large percentage of the citizens in my country.
You may visit a village and find a small group of ladies who are contributing USD5 monthly to the "organization" and have currently mobilised a total of USD10, 000 after 3 years. They maintain an account with a local micro-finance institution where the leaders are signatories. This collection brings untold pride and confidence to the members of the organization and they slowly lend to the group members who may buy a goat or two and pay back the amount over a 1 year period.
An accountant would be very relevant in these circumstances; for example preparing simple financial statement to access the performance of the organization, providing advice on effective credit collection, training of members of basic record keeping and so on.
You may be asking yourself how you can be a socially responsible accountant; probably all you have to do is spend a weekend training the students at the local school how to prepare an income and expense report (you may find that the teachers can’t prepare one). Participating in local council meeting where financial decisions may be made by financially illiterate people is one way of the accountant giving back to his community. We are very relevant to our communities and we should never take the privilege of being accountants for granted.
If an individual collapsed in a room where a doctor is, I believe the doctor is best placed to deliver First Aid, and therefore, we are also best placed to give guidance to our communities regarding financial decisions....."financial first aid."
We should endeavour to contribute in anyway we can to the development of our communities. I believe that we have a responsibility to our communities by virtue of our profession. A world of difference could be made to a shop keeper if we could help them prepare simple management accounts that would help them identify loss making products.
I believe that the accounting solutions are not just for huge cooperate organizations that can afford to meet the bills for accountants but we can also package our service in such a way that it can be accessed by those at the lowest level. One of the words synonymous with developing countries is poverty and some of the times this poverty is greatly aggravated by the lack of proper financial solutions. We have a responsibility to our communities and the world at large to provide the solutions that are relevant and affordable by our communities. I therefore challenge you to open your eyes to the financial problems facing your community and how you can contribute to transforming the situation.
Being affiliated to ACCA is a great privilege and I believe that it is against this background that we should ensure a significant portion of our community benefits from this affiliation.
A great philosophy.
Making the difference we can where we are is indeed a noble pursuits.
Posted by: Bruce Kakimpa | 03 July 2008 at 09:49
hmmm nice article.
many times it seems like we can only make an impact in a "big way", but this way we can make significant changes to smaller groups of people.
its very practical.
thank u
Posted by: Brenda | 03 July 2008 at 09:05