Meet our Top 50 Thriving Female Founder for 2019 Edition
Millycent Mashele is a Chartered Accountant CA (SA), Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and Registered Auditor (RA). Some of her educational achievements include: B Com from Wits University, B Compt Honours from UNISA, a Tax Practitioner and she is currently pursuing Master in Business Leadership (MBL) with UNISA School of Business Leadership.
She is considered as one of the highly skilled professionals within the accountancy field. As a young African woman, she is a dream come true for so many young South Africans looking up to her. She brings hope that indeed dreams do come true when hard work meets resilience. She was born and bred in a village called Agincourt, Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga. She is raised by a single mother who was street hawker and a domestic worker. She draws her inspiration from ordinary women like her mother who managed to put food on the table for the family of 9 siblings from nothing. She believes in an African Proverb that says, it takes a village to raise a child as indeed she was raised by her village.
Ms. Mashele went on to defy the odds and left a vast corporate footprint before venturing out into entrepreneurship. She has worked for some of the largest corporates such as: The Auditor General South Africa, Gauteng Department of Finance, Sekela Xabiso and MTN where she occupied various roles.
At the helm of corporate excellence, she decided to embrace her calling and founded The Legacy Centre (Pty) Ltd. A management consulting firm that offers a comprehensive range of business solutions from advisory and taxation, accounting and audit services. Her vision is to create, anchor and preserve business legacies by enhancing financial skills to other businesses. The business is committed to the responsible transformation of South Africa and believe in an empowerment paradigm that is rooted in sustainable wealth creation born of personal and organizational integrity directed by Ms. Mashele. She provides coaching and mentoring services to professionals and executives through The Legacy Academy, focusing on research and practical based leadership, governance and personal excellence.
The success she attained through The Legacy Centre has seen her render keynote addresses on local and international platforms sharing her knowledge on her field. Ms. Mashele has shared the platform with the father of corporate governance, Mervyn King who is the founding author of King Code of Corporate Governance for South Africa.
The passion and love she has developed for education through her own inspirational educational success, has been shared with students at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in the Department of Auditing in the past 2 and a half years through her lecturing. She has been imparting knowledge that goes beyond books, but that of resilience, humility and hard work to her students.
Highly passionate about women empowerment, she also founded Wansati Projects (Wansati means woman in xiTsonga) which is about the advancement of women in business, being an entrepreneur herself and working with other women entrepreneurs in her consulting company, she has identified a need for a focused empowerment towards women. She realised that women face unique challenges when in business because of the historical nature of business.
Millycent is a member of Agincourt Community Organisation (ACO), not for profit organisation formed by the professionals from her village to give back to the community in a form of career guidance, mentorship and development. They work with the schools back at their village to identify needs towards supporting the learners in a form of books, student calculators and more. This is aimed at producing more professionals within their village. Millycent is an epitome of bravery, courage and humility.