Hesham Almujamed

While teaching his accounting classes at the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training’s College of Business Studies, Hesham Almujamed hopes to provide his students with the tools to understand the stock market and how to read and analyze their own business. Almujamed stated that a fluent grasp of accountancy can reveal not just the transactions on a ledger, but the story of the historical events behind those numbers.

“Accounting is the language of business,” Almujamed said. “If you can study or calculate something, you can predict it in the furture and you can learn from this journey.”

حـصل المـجـمـد على جـائـزة جـابـر الأحـمـد للبـاحـثين الشبـاب لعام 2021 (في مجال العلوم الإدارية والاقـتـصـاديـة) التي تـمـنحهـا مـؤسـسـة الكـويت للـتـقـدم العـلمي، تقـديراً لعـمله (يشمل ثــلاثـة كـتـب وأكثر من عــشـرين ورقة بـحـثـية منـشورة) في مـوضـوعات تتـعلق بإمكانية التنبؤ بأسعار الأسهم في البنوك الخليجية وطرق تقييم الأسهـم في سوق الـكويت للأوراق المالية، وصولا إلى مقـاييس مـلاءمة المعلومات المحاسبية . لكن في سنـواته الأولى، لم يتوقع على الإطلاق أن يبرز اسمـه في عالم البحث الأكاديمي الغني بالبيانات.

“After I graduated from Kuwait University, I wasn’t really thinking about continuing my studies,” he said. “My plan was to go for auditing firms like KPMG [one of the Big Four accounting organizations].” But after accepting an offer to utilize his accounting skills at Expert Department -Kuwait’s Ministry of Justice, he saw how accounting (from corporate to forensic) could serve as a tool to help judges solve complicated problems. And after four years, he wanted to learn more.

By 2003, Almujamed had his master’s in accountancy from New Mexico State University, USA - and by 2011, he had his doctorate in accounting and finance from United Kingdom’s University of Dundee. The professor chose to pursue his doctorate in Dundee in no small part because it provided a good home for his family and young children, the eldest of whom has since started pharmacy school. Almujamed expresses nothing but deep appreciation and humility for how his family has supported his years of work - especially his wife, who herself obtained her master’s in clinical pharmacy from University of London. “She’s also very clever,” Almujamed said, smiling.

As it turned out, Almujamed had embarked upon his fledgling research career at a particularly fertile time for Kuwaiti accountancy: the Central Bank of Kuwait recently issued its first corporate governance code in 2012, followed by the institution of a Capital Markets Authority for companies listed on Kuwait Boursa in 2016. But his investigations have also happened to coincide with, and illuminate, recent decades of Kuwaiti vitality: the country now exhibits one of the highest-performing bourses among Arab countries and is listed as an emerging market by Morgan Stanley, an American multinational investment management and financial services company.

Back when he began high school in the early-1990s, Almujamed had originally elected to study mathematics. But he credits his high school accounting teacher, Adel Shuhab, with re-directing his path toward the science of accounting. That one influential teacher has had more impact than he ever anticipated - not only by setting Almujamed on the path to receive his doctorate, but also because he has gone on to have taught and trained countless students of his own over the last twenty years. Almujamed’s teaching duties have been a noble calling that doubles as a central part of his work.

“Kuwait is a small country,” Almujamed said. “If you go to a shopping mall, you see your students. You go to the bank; you see your students. I worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Commerce, and I think I had thirteen [former] students working with me.”

Moving forward in hisinvestigations, Almujamed is especially excited to continue his recent research into what conditions enable Certified Public Accountant (CPA) candidates to succeed in their Kuwaiti examinations. Data collection in Kuwait, however - compared to data sets available from North American and European vendors - can still present significant challenges, which has sometimes required Almujamed to gather necessary data from annual and corporate governance reports by hand. But Almujamed does also think that, with greater access to reliable, quality data (and perhaps more university assistants to process that data), he and his peers could plumb new depths of research and inquiry.

The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) provided financial support for Almujamed’s doctoral research, and he considers the honor of receiving the Jaber Al-Ahmad Prize as a crowning moment of his career. He is proud to have won this recognition through his years of diligent, high-quality research, in a profession that holds such meaning for him and the many students who have studied under him. And for a career to which he has devoted his life since he was a teenager, such a prestigious award feels like a long time coming. Even his own kids were looking to win this prize.

By Jonathan Feakins