The decision of letting go of the plans of having a physical CBC annual meeting this year, quite quickly led to replacing the same with a series of webinars. The CBC secretariat had to work swiftly to find an appropriate digital solution to carry out webinars available to so many participants, as well as presenters, situated all over the world. The first one took place on Tuesday 9 June and a most impressive number of 277 participants attended the event.
A panel consisting of CBC Chair Mr Kimi Makwetu (Auditor-General of South Africa and CBC Chair; Pamela Monroe-Ellis (Auditor-General of Jamaica, and CAROSAI Secretary-General); Edward Olowo-Okere (Global Director, Governance Global Practice, World Bank and Donor Chair of the INTOSAI-Donor Cooperation) and Einar Gørrissen (Director General, INTOSAI Development Initiative) engaged on the day’s theme of SAI capacity, performance and relevance during and subsequent to COVID-19 under the facilitation by CBC Vice Chair Helena Lindberg (Auditor General of Sweden). The panelists shared experiences on how the present global pandemic has affected SAIs’ work and ability to remain impactful and the challenges that it has brought to the everyday operations of public auditing world-wide.
Mr Kimi Makwetu spoke on SAIs’ relevance in time of COVID-19 and the importance of preventative controls, while Ms Pamela Monroe-Ellis shared her experiences of rapid and real-time audits by SAI Jamaica during COVID-19. Many questions were received from the participants that also touched upon the presentations of Mr Edward Olowo-Okere who spoke about donors’ perspective on the valuable role that SAIs can play in strengthening transparency and accountability to prevent inefficient or inappropriate use of resources during COVID-19. Finally, Einar Gørrisen talked about the importance for SAIs to ensure the ramping-up special skills during the COVID-19.
The theme of the webinar was very well received by the audience, proven by the engagement on-line in the Q&A section. Unfortunately, the time did not allow the panel to answer all questions, but the CBC secretariat will engage with the panel and attend to these separately on this website, in the weeks and months to come. Our moderator, Ms Helena Lindberg, said it well when she welcomed the fact that, although the pandemic is bringing massive challenges around the world, it has also pushed us to innovate how we work in the CBC. Through this webinar we managed to reach many more participants than would have been possible in a physical meeting.
Please find below the link to view and download the recording, as well as the presentations given by the panelists. N.B. you will need a password to open the link, password being: dETDaPE5.
Link to recording: https://eventoptions.webex.com/eventoptions/lsr.php?RCID=274e611efbc44a2780e13ed5bb2bfd1f
Thank you to all panelists and participants!
We look forward to seeing you again on 17 June for the webinar on the theme: SAI-Civil Society relationships in the interest of strengthened accountability and transparency. Further information will be available on this website shortly.
Note: All registered participants will receive the webinar materials by e-mail. The same materials will be published on the website as soon as they are available.