‘Improve business valuation skills’

Resource Centre (Sadc DFRC) five-day workshop on finance modelling.
“There is a definite need for local firms and economic authorities in general to strengthen their financial modelling capacities.
“Whether we like it not, we all have our prejudices, opinions, emotions and biases that affect  our interpretation of data. Financial modelling helps to ensure a sound basis for sound judgment,” he said.
Financial modelling is the task of building an abstract representation of a financial decision making situation. It is basically a mathematical model designed to represent the performance of a financial asset or portfolio of a business, project, or any other investment.
The workshop, which is running until Friday, will focus on a number of business valuation areas including scenario planning, management decision-making, capital budgeting, cost of capital, financial statement analysis and project finance and utilisation of computer-based applications.
The programme is an initiative between Sadc DFRC and the Zimbabwean cluster of the network comprising organisations such as IDCZ, Agricultural Bank of Zimbabwe, Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe and the Small Enterprises Development Corporation.
Sadc DFRC programme manager Dr Herrick Mpuku said although this programme was targeted at local finance managers, it would draw from other experiences from the region.
“Even though this is a country programme, participants will obviously benefit from the experience of other countries in financial modelling, that is why we have roped in participants from Lesotho, Nambia, Zambia and Botswana,” he said.
“On the other hand, since we will be looking at specific challenges facing Zimbabwe, players from the region can also benefit from the country’s experiences.”
It is expected that by the end of the programme, participants should be able to understand the elements of financial modeling, develop and practise financial modelling, to conduct simulations of different financing scenarios.
The Sadc DFRC was established in 2003 and is collectively “owned” by the Sadc Development Finance Institutions (DFI) Network whose membership stood at 27 as at March 2009.
Its mission is to provide capacity building, policy research and advisory services in development finance to Sadc development finance institutions and Governments, thus contributing to Sadc’s goals of economic growth and sustainable development.