Finance Officers enable science and scholarship
- Wits University
Science Month Feature: Hazvi Musodza has supported the integrity of research funding for nearly 14 years.
As we celebrate National Science Month this July, we take a moment to salute our unsung heroes, the people who enable Wits scientists, across all our faculties, to conduct research and push the frontiers of knowledge.
Meet Hazvi Musodza, Finance Contact Officer at the Faculty of Humaities. In this QnA she shares how her role supports Science. She believes that behind every published paper, funded fellowship, or transformative initiative, there is a financial structure that has had to work perfectly and be maintained so that researchers can focus on the ideas.
Please tell us about your background and what influenced your career Interests?
I am the youngest of five children, raised in a family that placed enormous value on education. My parents made sure all five of us were educated through to university level, even when it meant sacrificing their own comforts to make that possible. My mother was a school teacher, and my father worked first in the army and later in the security police force.
Growing up in that environment taught me discipline, structure, and the importance of long-term planning - qualities that came naturally with a father from a security and military background, and a mother whose entire profession was about nurturing potential and seeing things through to completion. Watching my parents manage a household of five children's education on careful budgeting and sacrifice also gave me an early, practical understanding of how resources have to be planned, protected, and prioritised to achieve something meaningful - which, looking back, planted the seed for my interest in finance.
That upbringing is really what pointed me toward accountancy. I went on to study an Honour's degree in Accountancy at the University of Zimbabwe and later pursued postgraduate studies in Accounting Sciences (UNISA) and Specialised Accountancy (Wits University). But there is a thread that runs even deeper than the numbers themselves - because my family's whole story was built around education changing lives, I have found real meaning in a finance career that specifically supports research and academia. Managing grant finances for a university means I am still, in a sense, doing what my parents did, that is, making sure resources are carefully managed so that education and knowledge can flourish.
How does your work support Science?
I joined Wits in August 2012, starting as a Finance Officer in Services. Over nearly 14 years, I have supported Wits' scientific and academic mission in several concrete ways which include managing financial administration for NRF-funded projects at the Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (CoE-MaSS) - handling budgeting, invoicing, and reporting that kept a national research centre financially compliant and functional. Additionally, I have been involved in administering Mellon Foundation and FRIC (Faculty Research and Innovation Committee) grants in the Humanities, ensuring researchers can focus on their scholarship while their funding is properly managed. Other responsibilities have been supporting audits and implementing recommendations, which protects the integrity of research funding at an institutional level.
In short, science and scholarship need money to run properly, and my role has been to make sure that money is tracked, compliant, and available when researchers need it.
How has your role changed over the year?
My role at Wits has steadily progressed in both scope and complexity since 2012. In the Services Department, now called Operations, Facilities and Management Department (OFMD), I gained foundational finance officer experience that gave me a solid grounding in the day-to-day mechanics of University finance. From there, I moved a step up into the Faculty of Science, where I mostly managed NRF-funded project finances for the Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (CoE-MaSS). I then worked in Journalism Department as a Finance Officer - an experience that broadened my exposure beyond internal University rules to compliance with external donor agreements.
In my current role as Finance Contact Officer for Humanities Research and Projects, I look after international grants such as the Mellon Inclusive Professoriate and Mellon Turning the Tide, draft funding contracts, and directly providing support to the Assistant Deans for Research.
I see this progression as mirroring how the quest for knowledge itself has evolved - research today is less about a single discipline working in isolation and more about interdisciplinary, donor-funded, internationally partnered projects with real accountability requirements attached. As research has become more complex and more scrutinised (donors, NRF, auditors), my role has had to grow in sophistication too - from basic bookkeeping to structuring and safeguarding the finances behind large-scale research that has real community and academic impact.
What innovative projects have you worked on and what excites you about these?
- Mellon Inclusive Professoriate and Mellon Turning the Tide: large, socially oriented grants aimed at transforming academia and addressing systemic issues. Managing budgets of this scale for projects with a transformative agenda is genuinely significant.
- CoE-MaSS (NRF-funded): supporting a national Centre of Excellence in mathematical and statistical sciences meant my financial work underpinned research with a national research-priority status.
- FRIC seed funding, book publication grants, and writing retreats: less about big money and more about enabling knowledge production directly - helping a book get written, or a new research idea get off the ground.
What excites me is the sense that behind every published paper, funded fellowship, or transformative initiative, there is a financial structure that has had to work perfectly and be maintained so that researchers can focus on the ideas.