Nonkululeko Sigudu

Nonku’ is currently the Chief Operations Officer for Sphola International (Pty) Ltd, which is a business consulting entity which specializes in skills development training and project management. The entity has a primary focus of contributing to the skills shortage in SA as well as alleviating youth unemployment.

She is also a Audit and Risk committee member at Elangeni TVET College.

Nonku’ was the Chief Financial Officer of Zungu-Elgin Engineering (Pty) Ltd for 2 years (2017 – 2019). She was part of the task team that turned the business around after it survived business rescue in 2015.

During her tenure, the entity was brought back to profitability and successfully improved shareholder confidence which led to additional project funding.
After completing her articles in 2007 at Deloitte, she relocated to Pretoria to join one of Transnet’s divisions, Transnet Rail Engineering, as a Management Accountant.

In May 2009, she moved back to KZN to join the Sugar division within the group of Tongaat Hulett, as a Business Analyst, where she was very instrumental in improving internal controls and talent development. In May 2013, she then moved back to Gauteng, to join L’Oréal Manufacturing where she worked as a Plant Chief Financial Officer, where she got an opportunity to be trained at Head Office in Clichy, Paris. Again, at L’Oréal she was faced with improving internal controls and drove the cost saving initiatives to drive competitiveness.

Having achieved her goals at L’Oréal, she moved back to Durban to join Unilever as a Risk & Audit Manager looking after Sub-Saharan Africa in December 2014. She has travelled extensively into the African countries, coaching teams, and reshaping the Internal Audit agenda.

Through her diligence, she was moved a year later, to the position of Finance Manager, looking after Category accounts. In this role she managed assets of c.a. R2.5bn by business partnering the Marketing and Customer Directors in strategic decisions and tracking the total financial performance and reporting of the category. She left this role at Unilever in May 2017.

She has played a role as the Diversity & Inclusion Leader for the Unilever Finance Team in SA and has assisted the function to come up with programmes that drive this agenda. Further to this, she has assisted Transnet Pipelines with their “Women in Pipelines” programme in Durban, which is a women empowerment initiative.

Nonku’ is passionate about coaching and development of others, and she currently serves on the Board of the African Women Chartered Accountants (AWCA), an NPO looking after identifying talent at school level to nurture them to CAs. She was the Chairperson for the KZN region from 2016 to 2021. She is also incredibly involved in her community in KZN where she mentor’s youth.