SAEC NEWS
Formal recognition of excellence
for event industry professionals
Back in 2015, EXSA, SAACI and IFEA pooled resources to set up the Council of Event Professionals Africa (CEPA) with the intention of establishing standards and developing training and certification programmes for the events industry in Africa.
F
By Kevan Jones – Council for Event Professionals (SACIA)
or much of the last five years, CEPA has been on a rocky road. “While we had a clear picture of what we wanted to achieve, we were completely out of our depth trying to navigate the complexities of the SAQA landscape,” explained Sue Gannon, former general manager of EXSA and one of the original CEPA Board members. “We knew that we wanted to promote the adoption of professional standards in the events industry and we understood that a formal designation registered with SAQA was the route we wanted to follow. What we didn’t recognise was the complexity of the criteria we’d need to satisfy if we wanted to develop and award a professional designation of our own,” she added. Five years of slow progress with the original SAQA applications highlighted the
need for a different approach. “This was a particularly difficult time for us,” recalled Glenn van Eck, SAACI treasurer and like Ms Gannon, a member of the original CEPA Board. He added: “It was clear that a voluntary board could not meet the detailed and time-consuming needs that were demanded of the SAQA certification process. We noted the rapid progress in achieving results for technical crews after the TPSA merged into SACIA and this provided the impetus to start a dialogue between CEPA and SACIA.” Over a few years this dialogue progressed, and a win-win scenario became evident to both organisations. This is always a drawn-out stage as board members of a body like CEPA want to ensure that the legacy they had envisioned would not be compromised. Patient
34 Business Events Africa February 2021
conversations saw progress as the relationship and trust developed. The CEPA Board and the founding members decided that they would best be able to serve their members by reconstituting themselves as a special interest group within SACIA. Once that decision was made in mid2019, the CEPA and SACIA boards established an interim council to integrate CEPA into SACIA’s governance and operational structures, a process that was completed shortly before the declaration of the State of National Disaster on 15 March 2020. We had our first meeting of the newly constituted CEPA Council during the annual Meetings Africa exhibition at the Sandton Convention Centre during late February. Two weeks later, the Covid-19 pandemic was upon us and the entire www.businesseventsafrica.com
