Innocent Gumbochuma, CFO of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), is a master of driving organisational efficiency, diversifying revenue, driving strategy and managing several responsibilities, in an environment filled with stringent public sector regulations.
When 2024 Public Sector CFO of the Year Award winner Innocent Gumbochuma joined SAQA, the public entity had just gone through a painful process of retrenching about 100 people and his role was to stabilise the organisation in terms of finances following the knock-on effect as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
SAQA is the oversight body of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in South Africa, a system that categorises and registers qualifications, part-time-qualifications, professional designations and learner achievements.
“It’s a public organisation but the state only funds about 60 percent of our budgetary
needs, the other 40 percent we have to secure on our own,” he explains.
“During Covid-19 the revenue model didn’t work because people were not getting work and no verification [of their qualifications] was being done. People were also not coming into the country so there was no revenue from the evaluation of their qualifications. So all that revenue was lost and my role was to make sure that the organisation was stable,” he adds.
Innocent’s big task was to find additional sources of revenue.
To generate additional revenue Innocent identified several sources of opportunity. Through SAQA’s management team efforts, they managed to generate additional revenue from a financial institution. This involved providing qualification verification services, using SAQA’s database, to roughly 50,000 of their loan applicants.
By automating the verification process, the financial institution was able to streamline loan approvals, reduce risk, and open up access to credit for people who might have struggled to get their qualifications verified.
“We also created a revenue stream from consulting, by charging money for teaching other colleagues in the rest of the [African] continent about how the national qualification framework system works,” he adds.
Creating trust
By identifying SAQA expertise as a valuable asset, Innocent managed to monetise
that expertise and create an additional revenue source.
“Currently we have also created a project management office to develop our own systems and one of our projects is the use of blockchain technology to verify CVs,” he says.
Innocent believed that this would help to create a digital trust system for professional
credentials. Imagine a world where employers can instantly verify a candidate’s credentials with absolute certainty, it’s like creating a digital notary service for a CV.
“Each achievement or qualification would be added as a block to a secure and permanent digital chain. So every time someone earns a new degree, completes a course, gets a new employment or receives a certification, that information would be added to their blockchain record creating this transparent and fraud-proof history of their accomplishments,” he says.
“So instead of relying on paper certificates, employers could have an irrefutable digital record, we want to be a one stop shop for employers so we will create APIs to link with the department of home affairs for ID verification and the department of police for criminal record checks,” he adds.
When the digital transformation team which is responsible for business automation, cybersecurity, data warehousing, blockchain technology and machine learning approached Innocent with a request for SAQA to hire testers as permanent employees, he didn’t say no due to budgetary constraints. Instead, he found another way to support the team.
His recommended solution was to follow a “testing-as-a-service” model, where the testers act as service providers as and when the organisation needs them. “It’s not about saying no, it’s about being innovative and finding ways that make things easier, ” says Innocent.
Complex rules
Building an internal team of developers to create custom software helped to reduce SAQA’s reliance on external consultants. It not only saved money, but it also empowered the team and allowed for increased flexibility and innovation without being at the mercy of external consultants and their timelines.
It is often difficult to compare the role of a CFO in the public sector with that of the private sector because they operate in very different regulatory environments.
“The public sector CFO does quite a lot that might not be known by my counterparts in the private sector,” says Innocent, adding that, as a CFO in the public sector, he has to lead several departments, including ICT, legal, finance, procurement, project management office, human resources and facilities.
Scooping the 2024 Public Sector CFO Award was well-deserved recognition of Innocent’s work in revitalising SAQA’s revenue generation strategy, ensuring financial stability and current focus on driving a comprehensive digital transformation as both CFO and CIO. Under his leadership, SAQA has achieved clean audit outcomes for two consecutive years.
“So to juggle all those balls at the same time you have to be someone with a strong backbone. You must also remember that in the public sector I can’t just walk into a Pick n Pay and buy a pen, I have to go through processes with the national Treasury registered and suppliers; so the rules are quite complex as legal compliance is key in the public sector,” he explains.
Innocent’s talent as a wearer of many hats is not only restricted to his professional life. In his private life he also enjoys a variety of musical genres, from amapiano to old school hip hop. When he’s not on the golf course, he can be found trying out his latest recipe on his patrons as a restauranteur or spinning the discs as a DJ, an exclusive activity he says only happened once!
