Episode 44: Six Chartered Accountants. Six remarkable stories.

Six Chartered Accountants. Six remarkable stories.

Season 4 of Chartered Accountants Worldwide's flagship webinar series brought together six remarkable people from across the globe. An Olympian and world record holder. A social enterprise pioneer in rural Mozambique. A tech founder who built for students without fast internet or expensive laptops. A networking expert who once found networking sleazy. And a community builder who turned a pandemic coffee meetup into something much bigger.

Different careers, different continents, different fields. But one idea runs through all of them: the profession is fundamentally a human business.

Liswaniso Namatama, a Chartered Accountant from Zambia, makes that case plainly. Auditing, he says, is not about ticking boxes. It's about understanding people, organisations, and the world around you. Manuel Rodrigues took that same foundation into rural Mozambique, building a network of tens of thousands of smallholder farmers into a genuine micro-economy. The key to keeping it alive when donor funding dried up? Commercial discipline. Nick Riemer used his CA qualification to win investor confidence not with a tech background, but with sound financial principles and early profitability.

Caitríona Jennings, who trained at PwC and ran for Ireland at the 2012 Olympics, talks about the mindset that links elite sport and a career in finance: risk awareness, resilience, and the ability to pick yourself up. Kingsley Aikins reframes networking as a process built on giving rather than getting. And Aster Thackeray's advice to younger members is simply this: keep your other interests alive. Every skill compounds.

All six episodes of Difference Makers Discuss Season 4 are now available to watch and listen on demand at charteredaccountantsworldwide.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to Chartered Accountants Global Update, your audio connection to the global community of more than two million trusted professionals. However, you're listening today over a coffee, on your commute, or somewhere in between, it's great to have you with us. Today we're looking back at a season that brought together six remarkable people from right across the globe. An AI entrepreneur, an Olympian and world record holder, a social enterprise pioneer, an advocate for the human side of audit, a master of networking, and a connector-building community on three continents. This is season four of our flagship webinar series, Difference Makers Discuss, and every episode is now available to watch and listen on demand. So let's take a quick tour through the season and the threads that tie these very different careers together. And no one makes that case better than Liswaniso Namatama, a chartered accountant from Lusaka, Zambia. Liswaniso has spent more than six years in audit, and he's on a mission to bust a myth. Auditing, he says, is not about ticking boxes or crunching numbers. It's about understanding people, organizations, and the world around you. Even as AI takes on more of the routine analysis, he's clear that professional judgment and genuine human-to-human conversation are still at the heart of good auditing. Ask him to sum up the profession in three words, and he doesn't hesitate, extremely amazing. That same theme carries into our conversation with Kitriana Jennings, a member of Chartered Accountants Ireland, who trained at PWC, ran for Ireland at the 2012 Olympics, and last year set a 100-mile world record in 12 hours, 37 minutes, and 4 seconds. Kytriana talks about the discipline of preparing for both exams and elite sport at the same time, and how that same risk-aware mindset helped her move from tax into a commercial role on an aircraft leasing trading desk. Her line on failure stayed with me. Sport, she says, teaches you that not succeeding isn't the end of the world. You pick yourself up, you learn, and you go again. Our next two difference makers show just how far a chartered accountancy qualification can travel. First, to rural Mozambique, and Manuel Rodriguez, a chartered accountant and Saker, top 35 under 35 winner. Over more than a decade, Manuel has grown EDP Mozambique into a genuine microeconomy. Picture a network of around 55,000 maize farmers and 14,000 soya farmers, supplying a hatchery and feed mill, with thousands of small-scale poultry farmers now turning a profit every 35 days rather than once a year. Here's the part that really lands. Manuel is honest that running it as a business and not a charity is exactly what kept it alive when donor funding across the region dried up. Commercial discipline, he says, was the saving grace. Its social purpose and commercial purpose meeting in the same place. Then there's Nick Remer, a chartered accountant from South Africa and co-founder of the Envigilator. Nick built his online assessment app during the pandemic, specifically so students without expensive laptops or fast internet wouldn't be left behind. The app now runs offline on entry-level smartphones, and it's expanding well beyond South Africa into the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and Europe. What struck investors most? Not a tech background, but his chartered accountancy one. Sound financial principles, early profitability, and the confidence to hold his own in the boardroom. As Nick puts it, the CA qualification is the best financial foundation you can give yourself. Our final two guests turn to a skill that schools and colleges rarely teach, but that shapes almost every career, the ability to connect with other people. Kingsley Akins, author of Networking Matters, published by Chartered Accountants Ireland, has a wonderful way of reframing it. He admits he once found networking sleazy and inauthentic. Then he learned to see it as a process built on giving rather than getting. His best line, good work, doesn't speak. Other people speak. If nobody knows how you're contributing, they simply move along to someone else. And he makes a lovely counterintuitive point. Introverts often make the best networkers because they listen, stay curious, and ask genuine questions. And finally, Asta Thackeray, chair of the UK Regional Council of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, who helps international businesses invest in Italy by day, and in her own time grew a pandemic coffee meetup into a social enterprise supporting thousands of local families. Asta's advice to younger members is refreshingly practical. Self-reflect, keep your other interests alive, and trust that every skill you gather, even a pottery course, will eventually compound into who you are. So there you have it. Six careers that look nothing alike on the surface, but share one quiet thread: a chartered accountancy qualification used as a launch pad for real impact. Whether that's transforming rural livelihoods, opening up education, breaking world records, or simply bringing people together. Every episode of Difference Makers Discuss Season 4 is available to watch and listen on demand. Just head to Chartered Accountantsworldwide.com and look for the webinars section. That's all for this episode of Chartered Accountants Global Update. Thanks for listening. Take care, and we'll see you next time.