Strengthening Public Oversight: Good practices for partnerships between civil society and supreme audit institutions

Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) are key to overseeing how public funds are spent. By independently scrutinising government financial management, SAIs provide legislatures and the public with evidence on whether public resources have been managed lawfully, efficiently and in the public interest.

Civil society organisations also play an important role in the accountability of public funds. They help amplify citizen’s voices, raise awareness, monitor and share real-world information on public service delivery and push for change and improvements.

However, in most instances, SAIs and CSOs rarely interact with each other, despite clear benefits for greater collaboration. SAIs often do not have the knowledge of how public goods and services are delivered on the ground, whilst CSOs face uneven access to information on public financial management. A lack of collaboration between the two can therefore lead to gaps in external public financial oversight.

To help address these gaps, this report provides a collection of approaches, strategies and practices designed to strengthen interaction between SAIs and CSOs across the audit cycle (planning, implementation, dissemination and follow-up). By drawing on lessons from SAI-CSO collaboration experiences in Malawi and Zambia, as well as examples from other contexts, this report offers concrete tools that SAIs and CSOs can adopt or adapt to improve audit relevance and ensure greater impact of audit recommendations.

Findings suggest that SAI–CSO collaboration is not an optional add-on to audit work, but an essential part of the broader structure through which public institutions and citizens work together to hold governments accountable for their stewardship of public funds.