At this year’s African Energy Week (AEW) in October, Mazars, the international audit, tax and advisory firm, is launching a new Johannesburg-based model audit team as part of the Energy and Infrastructure global team.
Taona Kokera, Energy and Infrastructure director at Mazars in South Africa, explains the context of the initiative as being part of the levers necessary to tackle the enormous infrastructure and energy backlog in Africa. The continent has households which have not switched on a light bulb due to lack of adequate generation capacity and transmission lines to evacuate the power.
“The United Nations sustainable development goal ‘9’ seeks to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation, a goal that will see a lot of energy and infrastructure projects being developed on the Continent,” he says. “The selected graduates will be working on international transactions within a world-class team – thereby not only upskilling young black South Africans, but bringing scarce skills in a critical sector back to develop the continent, because we have a deep moral responsibility to leave Africa in a better state than we found it.”
Given the African focus, resourcing of this centre of excellence presents an important transformational opportunity to employ young black South African graduates so that they gain exposure and training from a world-class team that works on global projects and clients.
Our plan is to commence with the present cohort of trainees, three more groups of graduates will be recruited every six months in March and September 2023, and March 2024. “With this full complement, Mazars identified the benefit of equipping the next generation with the skills to carve a career in energy and infrastructure finance” says Kokera.
The team members are graduates recruited under the government’s Youth Employment Services (YES) programme with a structured learning and development plan developed and run by Mazars. The programme will prepare them for working in a professional services firm and will supplement their technical model audit training with soft skills needed to work on client engagements.
“Our energy and infrastructure team is a global leader that has been ranked number 1 in the world on the Infra Deals rankings for each of the past seven years. Our deep desire is to ensure that we continue to make a positive contribution to society and improve the quality of life for people through home grown solutions by Africans for Africa.” he says.
“The Africa Energy Week conference offers precisely the audience that our new centre of excellence talks to and will represent, so we have chosen to launch our initiative at this event. The conference brings together African energy leaders, global investors and executives from across the public and private sector to discuss the future of the African energy landscape, this is the Africa we want,” concludes Kokera.
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