The Story So Far...

I arrived in Uganda back at the start of September, flying direct to Entebbe. I was due to travel first to Lira along with Elizabeth Garland, a member of staff of IRT (International Refugee Trust), the charity I will be working for. It is with Obaya Community Association (OCA), that I was scheduled to spend my first 10 days.

 

I had a few days to settle in and relax in Kampala. It’s a fairly amiable capital city, and super safe too. I spent my time just walking around and even managed to hook up with a couple of other AfiD volunteers for a coffee (and huge slice of chocolate cake!). First meal I had? Nandos. Not proud of that… But when you see that Rooster symbol, sometimes you just can’t say no…  

 

The next day Richard Adupa, CEO of the OCA, arrived to collect us and drive us all up to Lira. We were also travelling with a Sister (a nun) from Sudan and one of her colleagues.   The journey to Lira gave me my first chance to see some true East African scenery. I just love the red earth here… and EVERYWHERE is so green and lush. That together with many stereotypical images such as women seamlessly carrying huge loads on their heads on the sides of the roads and men on bicycles cycling between towns made me feel I had truly arrived… It felt it was fair to say I was going to love this place! We also crossed the Nile at a point of some big rapids – the first time I had seen the Nile since visiting Egypt many years ago! It all felt very African!

 

 

We arrived in Lira in good time and settled in. It’s around the 5th or 6th largest city in Uganda and unfortunately the Lira district was one of those affected by the insurgency, displacing thousands of people from their land into camps. Now people are returning to try to pick up the pieces, and that’s where groups like OCA come in to help. They run various projects helping local communities within the Lira District primarily through education and training of agriculture and healthcare.

 

Since my stay at Lira with OCA coincided with Lizzie’s visit, it gave me the opportunity to see OCA’s work first hand. OCA with IRT’s support have already trained and provided 60 individuals with bee hives or citrus saplings with the end goal of allowing them to harvest their own honey and growing citrus fruits for sale in local markets to provide an income.

 

 

A couple of days in, I was able to have an initial talk about the existing finance function of the 5 strong OCA organisation. What I was delighted to discover, was actually a very efficiently set-up system. Numerous financial controls were already in place and working effectively. In addition the filing system and documentation of receipts etc was also very good, which was all quite contradictory to my expectations. This was all largely due to OCA’s super CEO, Richard, who has a strong background in accounting having studying it at University, worked for an audit firm and had prior experience in accounting for NGOs. The rest of the OCA staff, whilst not from accounting backgrounds, were also all highly competent.

 

After a solid morning of investigating how the current accounting system works, I could identify only minimal weaknesses. It became a question of how to increase capacity and grow rather than alleviating the weaknesses therefore. To that end, the most obvious area was the computerised system of accounting. Currently OCA were using ledgers set up within MS Excel. Whilst the programme (Mango) is not bad, since it is not a formal accounting software package it has some inherent weaknesses. I therefore recommended the use of a simple accounting package and setting it up whilst I was still in Lira to allow me to train the accounts staff as necessary. Thankfully, Adrian (the CEO of IRT) agreed to support my recommendation (after twisting his arm over the phone) and we swiftly arranged the purchase of Intuit’s Quickbooks Pro 2010 accounting software online.

 

The next challenge was downloading this from the internet…  Lira is relatively good for internet access (being a largish city), however it doesn’t matter where you are – you are pretty much guaranteed a painfully slow connection. OCA have their own modem so we left the download running overnight – an estimated 8hr download time (probably 15mins in the UK!!). That meant not a lot else could be done in the meantime, which was frustrating from an accounting point of view, but there’s always a lot of entertainment around the OCA offices! Andrew Anywar is their Programme Coordinator (or second in command as I like to call him) and he’s an absolute legend! The guy can talk your ear off, and loves a good story. I like to let him just go and entertain me!

 

We discovered the next day that the download had failed overnight because Richard’s laptop didn’t have enough spare RAM.  It meant no Quickbook related work could be done for the day, having to re-start the long download.  Richard takes his laptop with him to Kampala on weekends, where he is studying another course in Financial Management (seriously – this guy is my hero. The model man of modern-day Africa).

 

That left us to enjoy a relatively relaxed weekend… Saturday involved another field trip to visit some of the 60 beneficiaries at their homes and see their land (with bee hives / citrus plants).

 

Monday morning and the Quickbook was finally ready to play with. I never got excited about starting-up an accounting package back in the UK… must be something about Africa??!  I only had two days to get it up and running. So with a couple of intense days I sat with Sylvia (the accounts assistant) and Gloria (a volunteer who is currently studying a bachelors in accounting and plans to join OCA full-time upon completion) and commenced training on the basics – primarily the logging of transactions. 

Quickbooks is very user friendly and it’s difficult for anyone to get lost in any accounting lingo. For a 3yr+ qualified accountant therefore, it takes less than an hour to get your head completely around all functionality. A lot was achieved in the two days with my most enthusiastic of students, however inevitably we ran out of time.

 

I have come to love it in Lira and working with the OCA team. We shared a lot of laughs and got along like a house on fire at work and over the odd beer in the evenings. To that end, I decided there and then I would return. My AfiD commitments mean I am to move on to two other IRT partners over the next 2 months, but I have committed myself to ‘finish the job’ so to speak and agreed this with IRT and AfiD.