Credit where it's due: who benefits from your accountancy skills? Martyn Trotman describes his experiences of setting up a micro-credit programme in rural west Africa.
| Author | Trotman, Martyn |
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During World War II, when most children from British cities were being evacuated to the countryside to escape German bombs, my father moved our family to Nigeria. My parents insisted that we must integrate into local life, so we didn't have the luxuries enjoyed by many British expatriates in the big towns. My earliest years were spent in small African villages and this is why I decided to get involved in the activities I describe here--I am only repaying in a small way part of the huge debt I owe to Africa.
My involvement began when, in July 1993, a young expert comptable called Eric Delesalle helped to establish a humanitarian organisation. Among other things, he was professor of accounting at the Institut National des Techniques Economiques et Comptables, part of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. I met him because I had been preparing the expert comptable exams. When he and a small group of other accountants decided to form Experts Comptables Universels (ECU), I offered to join the board. Delesalle became president and I was asked to look after international relations.
One of his colleagues was Blaise Goussou, a young man from Benin in west Africa. Goussou asked whether ECU could help with the continuing professional education of accounting teachers in his country because, without well-educated bookkeepers and accountants, he feared that its economic progress would be retarded.
So it was in 1996 that I took a team to Benin. On our arrival in its main city, Cotonou, we were told that we were expected to go to Togo the next morning to attend the opening of a local branch of the Observatoires de Pratiques Comptables en Afrique in its capital, Lome. This was my first visit to Togo.
By the late nineties ECU had established operations in Benin, Madagascar, Mall and Togo. I took responsibility for co-ordinating its actions in, and relations with, Benin and Togo. While working in Cotonou in 1998 I met the cultural attache at the French Embassy. I mentioned the library that we had created for students and others on subjects including accounting. He visited it and wrote a letter praising it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. As a result, the ministry offered to finance the transport of books and other items for us by container to each of our countries.
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Later that year I was introduced to Kossi Ayeh, founder and general secretary of Frere Agriculteurs et Artisanat pour le...
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