RSS feedsAndrew Hinds didn’t have to head for Somalia. He could have been in romantic France, or headed for the glitz of Hong Kong.
But he chose to head for Africa to audit Somalia’s Commercial and Savings
Bank.
He was not, however, prepared for the stark reality of Africa’s impoverished.
The sight that met him upon landing was of masses of desperately poor and
destitute Ethiopian refugees thronging the streets of Hargeisa.
The first-person witness of such dire poverty threw Hinds into an inner turmoil in which he questioned his purpose as an accountant.
‘I’d never experienced anything like that. I thought, well, there’s got to be more to being an accountant than auditing banks important though that is,’ he says.
Twenty-seven years on and Hind, chief executive of the Charity Commission the regulator of charities in England and Wales - has this year been presented with the Outstanding Achievement Award at the prestigious Charity Awards.
Hind says the turning point for him was that first impression in Somalia. It made him choose the charity sector over that of assisting those in the established corporate world.
He was then keen on a firm with ‘deep roots in Africa’.
PKF ticked all the boxes with its pro-African approach to developing local people.
‘I was really lucky to find PKF, which had grown up out of a colonial practice, so it bought into a practice that was very well embedded in Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya,’ he says.
Hind was also impressed that the firm in Africa constituted also 50% African partners and managers.
Its policies meant PKF had ‘fantastic’ relationships with governments of the four countries in which it had practices.
‘A lot of work relating to international aid and development came to PKF, often flowing into governments, and into bilateral aid activity,’ says Hind.
Diplomatic role
The countries shared post and telecommunications networks, a railway system and an airline. But in 1979 it all fell apart due to the Tanzania/Uganda war.
‘I’d only been in Africa for four weeks and found myself being asked to chair meetings of the ministers from these three countries, deciding who was going to get what, and why,’ he says.
By the time he left in 1983, Hind had resolved that he was going to somehow enter the charity sector - a big decision to make for a man still in his twenties.
But back in the UK, charity head hunters were initially shocked by his decision to move into a sector usually filled with retired managers who no longer held career aspirations.
‘They asked me why I was throwing away a really promising career by moving into the charity world,’ Hind says.
The advice came as a blow to the enthusiastic Hind.
‘But what they did say is that if I was really serious, I would need to have a bit more to offer than purely commercial experience in practice.’
So he went away and worked for three years at the BICC group (now Balfour Beatty) as essentially an international financial trouble-shooter, based in London, but with his territory in Africa and the middle-east.
The job massively broadened his international experience but his next window of opportunity came, he says, upon opening Accountancy Age.
‘I’d been there three years and one day I opened Accountancy Age and I saw my absolute dream job FD of Action Aid.’
But it took a great deal of convincing on his part, given that he was relatively young for the role.
‘I had to show them that I had energy, passion and commitment and quite a lot of on-the-ground experience. It was a combination they were happy to go with. That taught me quite early in my career that if you’re good enough, you’re old enough to do something,’ he says.
He spent five years at Action Aid, then took two more roles as director of finance at Barnados, and then ten years as chief operating officer of the BBC World Service.
His strong views on accountability in how money donated by the public is spent have translated into Hind being one of the founders of the Statement of Recommended Practice for accounting in the charity sector.
Hinds believes that accountants have a crucial role to play in helping
communicate better with the public to describe what they’re doing.
‘You see all kinds of great work going on all over the place, but charities are
still not putting enough time and effort into reporting back to the donating
public about what they’ve done with the money,’ he says.
Hind thinks he knows what the problem is.
‘You need that passion [for the charity work] but you’ve then got to lock it away in a box because it can take you over and get you to leave your business sense chained up outside. A lot of charities have lots of people that either work for them or on their non-executive boards who are very motivated by the cause and sometimes forget the strategic analysis and the business disciplines that they would never leave behind if they were in a city boardroom,’ he says.
Hind may be pricking ears in the sector but he is not about to stop beating this
