West African attendees tune in to hear experts share their vision of the future

Over 1,000 attendees from 10 countries across West Africa recently tuned into an online ACCA

Africa event to hear about the important role that professional accountants are playing to

support economies with the challenges posed by COVID-19.

For the session, ACCA gathered together expert panellists including:

Taiwo Oyedele FCCA, PwC Tax Leader, West Africa

Laoye Jaiyeola, CEO of Nigeria Economic Summit Group

Kwabena Situ FCCA, Business Process Solutions at Deloitte Ghana

Abraham Kwabena Anang PhD, Director of Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical

Research (NMIMR) – University of Ghana

The aim of the event was to highlight how the accountancy profession is supporting the

economies of Nigeria, Ghana and West Africa, and also ACCA key partners including public

practice firms, multinational corporates, government, regulators, auditor generals, national banks and national bodies.

At the session, Jamie Lyon, head of business management at ACCA gave an overview of his

recent COVID-19 global survey ‘The Road to Recovery’. The report details the many key

issues that need to be addressed by policymakers and governments to review economic rescue

packages and enable a return to sustainable growth.

The report offers a “roadmap to recovery”, where ACCA recommends that organisations follow

the “three As” – Act and respond sustainably to the immediate crisis in the short term; Analyse

the different information sources to start to build the path to recovery in the medium term and anticipate how strategies need to evolve over the longer term.

Tom Isibor, head of ACCA Nigeria, chaired the event and says: ‘The purpose of the profession

at this time cannot be under-estimated, as it is helping to build and sustain economies during

the turbulence the pandemic brings. This was a key outcome of the session we held, with

panellists and attendees agreeing that managing COVID-19 is the new normal for many of us.’

Speaking on the role of accountants in advocating for the digitization of business processes,

panellist Taiwo Oyedele says: ‘The role of professional accountants is to guide their

organisations. They must be agile in properly identifying their need to invest in the right

technology at the right time. Professional accountants must find a way to help their

organisations to preserve their competitive advantage.’