2023 2023 CGIAR Annual
Report

In 2023, the Internal Audit within the CGIAR organization provided strategic and operational assurance while also offering advice to its stakeholders, with the aim of achieving its vision of becoming "an integrated, digitally enabled, innovative, and trusted partner supporting CGIAR institutions to deliver impact through value-adding assurance and advice." To realize this vision, we established specific priorities for 2023 across our strategic focus areas, namely:

1. Enhancing and driving a business partnership approach through building robust relationships with our stakeholders at the global and Center levels and measuring performance via a set of Key Performance Indicators. We aligned Internal Audit with the key organizational priorities throughout 2023 to adapt to the constantly evolving stakeholder landscape. Closer engagement with strategic initiatives was achieved via strategic advisory and assurance work, including engaging with the strategic risk review process, reviewing funding modalities, and assessing talent risks.
2. Aligning the delivery with AFRC and senior management expectations through ongoing dialogue, regular rinternal audit work plan reviews, and contextualizing internal audit findings and recommendations within the organizational environment and goals.
3. Building an integrated internal audit by coordinating internal audit teams through thematic engagements that cover more than one Center.
4. Achieving impactful communications by embedding the communication tools already developed, such as new internal audit report templates, which received positive feedback from a wide range of stakeholders.
5. Stepping up alignment with other assurance providers through an Assurance Community that Internal Audit set up to drive better understanding of the risk assurance landscape for CGIAR governing bodies and coordinating assurance activities for more efficient coverage.

In 2024, the CGIAR Internal Audit will continue to set ambitious goals to respond to stakeholder needs via a better-aligned, more efficient, and innovative internal audit function. The primary focus for 2024 is to work toward an integrated internal audit function following up on the outcome of the unified governance review.

Delivery in 2023

In 2023, the CGIAR Internal Audit delivered 72 reports across three types of engagements:

• Strategic and Thematic engagements (6) of assurance or advisory nature that responded to CGIAR-wide risks and priorities. They encompassed multiple CGIAR Centers and were designed and delivered through close collaboration among the CGIAR Internal Audit teams.
• Centre-specific engagements (68) responding to Center-specific risks.

In 2023, the focus of Strategic and Thematic engagements included:

• Understanding the risk exposure and existing controls related to engaging casual labor, one of the most vulnerable categories of laborers in agriculture.
• Review of management of significant related parties by selected CGIAR Centers.
• Engaging with the risk review process, offering real-time advice to strengthen strategic risk management.
• Engaging with the working group reviewing the funding/costing modalities in CGIAR, bringing in the on-the-ground experience and knowledge to support the outputs of the working group.
• Facilitating a better understanding of the key elements of the talent risk by CGIAR Centers and opportunities to manage them based on mapping of measures to manage the talent risk by CGIAR Centers.
• Developing a self-assessment tool to map the controls to manage the funding risk and summarizing key areas to strengthen funding risk management, following the Phase 1 work conducted in 2023.

In addition, Internal Audit carried out two investigations into misconduct in response to specific requests from management in close collaboration with the CGIAR Office of Ethics and Business Conduct.

Twice in 2023, we followed up on the implementation of agreed management actions in response to internal audit recommendations to indicate the progress of bridging identified gaps in governance, risk management, and internal control.

Resources

As of the end of 2023, the CGIAR Internal Audit staff complement included 26 members, with a gender distribution of 16 men (61 percent) and 10 women (39 percent) . The auditors operated within 7 teams across 12 countries.

The diverse composition of the team brings together a range of professional qualifications, including Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), Certification in Risk Management Assurance (CRMA), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Certified Management Accountant (CMA) and Certified Business Data Analyst. In response to the need for skills in cyber security, our staff obtained a certification from ISC2 in Cyber Security (CC). Our colleagues published two articles in the ISACA journal and IIA Magazine on Cyber and Information security.

At the end of 2023, seven job vacancies within the Internal Audit Function presented opportunities to strengthen and expand the team. To enable the delivery of engagements, the CGIAR Internal Audit Function is co-sourcing some of its activities.