The University of Fort Hare has been accredited, producing its first CAs this year and the growing the overall number in South Africa. The urgent need to step up the numbers of qualified black chartered accountants in South Africa is top of the accountancy agenda, as transformation and training initiatives to address the backlog begin to bear fruit.

The Thuthuka Education Upliftment Fund, a business and transformation organisation of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica), aims to transform the membership of the profession in line with the demographics of the country.

Thuthuka means ‘‘to develop" in Zulu. The first Thuthuka project was launched in May 2002 in the Eastern Cape and was funded by the labour department's national skills fund through the Seta for Finance, Accounting, Management Consulting and other Financial Services (Fasset).

"We ran secondary school educational initiatives purely as a supplementary educational initiative to grow the pool of learners that could come into the profession. We believe there is a huge amount of talent, but it is sitting in areas where education and career awareness can't reach them - and that there is a massive shortage of maths and science and English lecturers," said Saica transformation and growth project director Natalie Zimmelman.

She said the programmes reached about 8000 to 9000 learners a year, adding that there was close co-operation with the education department, "not because we were trying to replace what they were doing, but to supplement that work. We believe for the most part that they have the right strategies in place - the problem is finding the skills and resources to implement those strategies."

The project was then rolled out into KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo, followed soon thereafter by Gauteng - and now programmes are running in eight provinces. In May 2007, Thuthuka celebrated the graduation of 69 students from the first two years of intake into the project at the University of Fort Hare.

Victor Sekese, CEO of audit firm Sizwe Ntsaluba VSP and current president of the Association for the Advancement of Black Accountants in Southern Africa (Abasa), pointed out that there were only a limited number of universities accredited with Saica for the purposes of acquiring a CA.

Sometimes, for reasons of affordability or other factors, students end up going to previously disadvantaged universities that are not accredited with the organisation. "We initiated a project to work together with those universities to improve their standards to the extent that they get accredited with Saica," Sekese said.

"We have been working with the University of Fort Hare and the University of Limpopo and I'm pleased to say that we have managed to get Fort Hare accredited. The pass rate at qualification level has been very good and they have produced their first CAs this year," he said.

Mansoor Salee, a partner at Mazars Moores Rowland, said greater support was needed for the initiatives by Saica and Abasa to fund full-time study for the certificate in theory of accounting (CTA) by blacks. Salee noted that only 13.3% of South Africa's 27047 chartered accountants are previously disadvantaged individuals.

"It's moving in the right direction, but that doesn't mean they are all going to qualify as CAs. A significant number of blacks doing articles simply don't have the funding to study CTA on a full-time basis. They need to work to make money to support themselves and their studies. So they try to do it part time, but find it exceptionally demanding. So we've ended up with a lot of professionals in the market with a BCom, who have completed their articles but don't have CTA and are thus not CAs," said Salee.