She learned her most prized skills beside her father during school holidays long before she knew she was being taught anything at all.
In 2017, when Christine Nakayenga joined PSI Uganda, she came with something most incoming leaders have to work to build: a familiarity with the Uganda Revenue Authority. Like many organisations, PSI Uganda had been using a consultant to handle its withholding tax exemption filing – a reasonable arrangement for teams without a tax background. Christine volunteered to take it on herself.
“I said we can no longer use consultants, because it is easy to apply for withholding tax exemption. We applied and got it smoothly on our own. That is a cost we have saved,” she says.
The confidence behind that decision came from her father. Her school holidays often doubled up as an unofficial apprenticeship, with Christine spending years watching him at his accounting work. Eventually, he began to trust her to do some of the work herself.
“He exposed me to the Uganda Revenue Authority. So when I got to work, it was easy for me to blend in. It was easy for me to file a pay-as-you-earn return or a withholding tax return,” she says.
As Christine sees it, the kind of knowledge that comes from watching someone do something, rather than being taught how it works in theory, is absorbed differently. The practical literacy he instilled meant she could question inefficiencies and spot unnecessary costs at a glance. Although she does not remember going through the motions of learning it, she has it at her fingertips.
When she was in senior secondary school, her father ran an accounting consultancy and brought her in to help. She engaged with actual processes and built a working familiarity with the tax system that most finance professionals only develop years into their careers.
A solid foundation
Christine would eventually study economics at Makerere University, paving a path into finance. But she identifies her father as her first mentor, who laid the foundation for where she would end up.
“There are so many things he taught me that I eventually applied when I got into the workplace,” she says.
In January 2018, PSI Uganda created a financial analyst role and appointed her to fill it. She built a monthly financial bulletin from scratch, tracking the organisation’s budget, funding pipeline and programme costs. It was designed so that management could use it to make decisions and stay informed.
Today, Christine encourages her own teams to understand processes rather than outsource accountability.
“I find out what challenges they are facing and how they can be supported. I make it an important point to ensure that my team has a budget for things like CPDs,” she says.
Seeking balance
Her father’s influence also came from watching him endure illness with resilience. For more than two decades, he has lived with diabetes, undergoing dialysis for more than 10 years. Through that prolonged struggle, he continued to provide and prioritise his children’s education.
The balance she now seeks between leadership and personal wellbeing is a direct response to that example. In many ways, her father taught her that stewardship extends to the body and the home.
“I’m the first born, and amidst all those challenges he has done his best to ensure that we all go to the best schools. So looking at how that plays out, then you realise that you need to take care of yourself more because diabetes is a family history disease,” she says.
