CFO Cares: Rachael Madziwanyika mentors youth for workplace readiness

Photos: Patrick Furter “You have to be proactive if you want to plan your future effectively.”

CFO CARES

Rachael Madziwanyika mentors youth for workplace readiness

ACCA fellow and CFO Rachael Madziwanyika is passionate about mentoring younger colleagues, students, and even school learners – those in need of insight and direction to shape their futures. By Kate Thompson Davy

Rachael Madziwanyika is the CFO of Bühler Southern Africa, a multinational plant and equipment manufacturer with a strong presence in machinery for food and transport. Being the CFO is a role that – naturally – keeps her busy and engaged, with multiple divisions falling under her supervision. Despite this, she always makes time for mentoring and coaching. “I'm very keen to mentor young black girls and women, and bring them into the industry,” she says. “Accounting has traditionally been viewed as not the place for a girl child, but that’s obviously a misconception. So, I do a lot of mentoring. It's one of my passions, actually.”

Educational building blocks

From her own experience, Rachael explains, Black African children and especially girls are too often not explicitly taught about money management. She says that what is also lacking in the African community is clear and meaningful career guidance. Even in her own life, she says, she’d planned to pursue law but didn’t necessarily have the aptitude for it and needed to be redirected by a teacher and her father – into viewing accounting as a career option. “Generally career guidance in some schools is just asking kids what they want to do, instead of observing what their strengths are or how they will progress to where they want to go,” she says. This isn’t deep enough, she believes.

Additionally, she argues, most of the time when these children are still in school, they don’t know what they want to do. Instead of asking ‘what do you want to be?’, Rachael says, we should be asking the qualitative questions such as ‘do you like working with numbers, with people, alone or in a group?’ – and more than that, she wants to see both teachers and parents really discussing a broad range of options with young people.

Starting close to home

When her own daughter was in school, Rachael says, she found herself mentoring both her and her friends: “You have to be proactive if you want to plan your future effectively and you aren’t always given the opportunity to plan your future in the school setting.” Rachael’s daughter, now a singer who uses the stage name Mo$hpit Cindy, says having her mom on board as a mentor has helped her feel safe and supported when dealing with challenges, and she really appreciates the “mature and intelligent advice”. “It has changed my perspective, the way I view things [compared to] the way I used to before. It helped me manage my finances better. I must say that I am grateful to God for having such a wonderful support structure.”

Her daughter is currently studying a business degree. She is also a singer songwriter, “a budding artist” and – she jokes – Rachael is her ‘momager’. With the students she mentors, Rachael says, often the subjects that they were doing were not relevant to what they wanted to study or to pursue after they left school. “They seem to think ‘I can study whatever is easiest when I'm in matric and then hope for the best when I leave’ – so I found that there's a gap, a big gap that needed to be filled with active mentoring.” “With those I mentor, I like to start the process with them around grade nine or so, and we begin with the basics, talking about career paths, about subject choices like, for example, the fact that you need mathematics (rather than mathematical literacy or accounting) as a subject in order to head into the field of accounting.” Intervening at this stage means one can still make important changes, such as getting extra tutoring in a subject if catching up is the tactical choice.

Many paths to take

With the right attitude and willingness from a mentee, Rachael says, you can also redirect them at a later stage. Going straight into university is not the only way, she is keen to point out. She is particularly proud of one young man who chose to return to school to get a better mathematics mark after completing matric in order to pursue accounting in the long run, after learning he wouldn’t be accepted into his desired courses. “He came to me and asked me ‘What did I do wrong?’” “He still took that year out, and went back and did one year purely maths. This was difficult, especially considering all his friends were going to university at the time. But now he’s pursuing his accounting degree.” Another of her mentees that Rachael speaks of with pride instead decided to work first: “She will eventually do a degree, but at the moment she's doing a bookkeeping learnership. She's getting life skills, workplace skills, learning to use a computer and to communicate at all levels,” she says.

Skills for life

“In a learnership role, you have many learnings, for example how to write an email, how to set up meetings, how to interact with others in the workplace, and so on. Those are skills that often these kids don't have even when they come out of university or a college environment,” Rachael says. For Rachael, mentoring includes speaking to people about many matters including work, career, and personal finance. “I try to educate people on managing their finances, managing themselves and also just how to be an employee with integrity,” she explains. She continues: “I also enjoy helping families, particularly with financial planning. Some just need an understanding of how to be successful with their finances. It is almost like family development, but from a financial perspective.” This, she says, includes things that experienced professionals – with their corporate exposure as a kind of privilege – may take for granted. Not everyone is equipped with a solid understanding of concepts like compound interest, the destructive power of debt, or how to set up a budget, and for those that do there can be a gap between the theory and the practice. Rachael describes helping one family who didn’t understand why their money seemed to run out before the month did, despite not living particularly extravagant lives. Under her guidance, they sat down and mapped out three months of spending on Excel, and it really gave them insights into what their real income was, how they were spending and on what they were spending. She says they had never really sat down and had the conversation about their income and expenditure. The couple in question had a lot of revelations and were able to make better plans for themselves and their budget. “I really enjoy that side of coaching too,” she says, “where life coaching and family and finances meet.”

Where are they now?

As for the young people who have benefited from Rachael’s dedication to having the career heart-to-hearts, planning their training, and sharing her experience and wisdom, several are now finance professionals or well on their way to qualifying. “And a couple of the mentees now work with me at Bühler,” she says proudly. Twenty-one year old Faith Magubane, finance and HR trainee, is one of them. “I started mentoring her when she was in grade 10. She has now been working post-matric for 18 months in HR and finance,” says Rachael. Another is Thelma Kumbula, customer service quotation officer, 28. Thelma says: “Being mentored by Rachael has allowed me to look at life differently. From my relationships and career, I have learnt that every situation and all my experiences play a vital role in adding value and reaching my final goals.” l