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Fellow Name: Alpha Kécouta Seck

Country: Senegal

Fellow’s home audit office: Cour des comptes du Sénégal (Senegal Court of Audit)

Title: Magistrate, Advisor

Canadian Host Office: Office of the Auditor General of Québec

Decoration Color: Amber

Profile Headshot:

My Fellowship:

My Canadian placement:

Office of the Auditor General (OAG) of British Columbiaa

My Canadian audit team:

I was part of a team auditing the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy, led by Principal Gabriel Lombardi.

My most valuable learning:

Engagement skills. This includes both engaging auditees and engaging team members. Engagement skills, in my perspective, are key to the success of an audit project.

How my Canadian colleagues and mentors helped me:

They are really professional, and they helped me to learn how to conduct a performance audit in practice. My mentor gave me useful instruction and comments on my personal audit project. I really appreciated their time and their patience.

What I enjoyed most:

Equality everywhere.

No barriers when communicating with each other, all words were always respected, all questions were answered.

My audit plan:

I developed my audit plan project with the guidance of my mentor, Principal Kimberley Leach of OAG Canada.

The connection to my country’s development priorities:

My audit project will look at agricultural vocational training for rural labourers in Binh Phuoc Province.

Training for rural workers in agriculture helps vulnerable groups, such as poor households, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities, to get jobs and increase their income, and boosts the local economy in new, green and modern agriculture.

This audit is most related to Vietnam’s target 4.4, under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, to “substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship”, and target 5.7, under SDG 5, to “ensure that all women, particularly poor women in rural areas and women from ethnic minority groups, have equal rights to economic resources and equal rights to use land and own other forms of property, inheritance, financial services and natural resources as provided for by national law”.

How CAAF and my host office helped:

The courses provided new knowledge of performance audit, and my mentor’s instruction helped me apply the knowledge to my audit plan. Furthermore, my audit plan was better after I participated in challenge sessions because they helped me realize some important things to add.

The skills and knowledge I improved by developing this plan:

I learned how to scope an audit effectively and how to develop an audit logic matrix. In the future, this will help me to avoid unexpected issues when conducting an audit.

My future impact:

The new knowledge I’m most excited to share with my colleagues:

I’ll be happy to share all I learned, but especially mainstreaming of gender equality in audits. This will be a new lens at my office.

The difference I hope to make:

Performance audits always focus on value added. Consideration of gender equality and SDGs lenses in auditing will have a great impact on implementing commitments to citizens and international goals.

In the long term, audits that include gender issues and the SDGs are certain to contribute to improving our Administration’s performance and creating the conditions for harmonious and sustainable development.

My professional goals:

I hope to build a professional team in performance audit in my office, supporting more auditors to come together to deepen their insights and knowledge of performance audit.

My Experience Part 1:

The most Canadian thing I did was…

Skiing, watching a hockey game, and having Tim Hortons coffee.

My favourite cultural experience in Canada was…

Fun activities at cultural festivals and events.

Something few Canadians know about my country is…

Vietnamese street food is really delicious and cheap. You can spend $1 CAD and be full and happy.

 

My Experience Part 2:

My Fellowship experience in one sentence:

My Fellowship experience is an important milestone for my professional career and also for my life.

My Fellowship in a single word:

Meaningful.

Now that I have completed the Fellowship…

I’m happy to share how valuable Fellowship is.

Two experience images (2022-2023):

Gender: Female

Alpha holds a master’s degree in public law and an advanced studies diploma in decentralization law and management of local authorities, all from the Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis. He graduated from the Centre de Formation Judiciaire du Sénégal in 2011, and also received training from the École Régionale Supérieure de la Magistrature on the OHADA (Organization for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa) Uniform Acts in 2013. For ten years, he served in turn as a correctional and commercial judge, a family court judge and an examining magistrate.

He joined the Cour des comptes du Sénégal, the country’s supreme audit institution, in March 2021 as a Magistrate, Advisor, in the Local Authorities Chamber of the Court.

He has taken several training courses offered by the Cour des comptes on performance auditing and applied that knowledge in the context of an annual assessment of a funding program for local authorities called Pacasen (Programme d'Appui aux Communes et aux Agglomérations du Sénégal).

My goals for the Fellowship

I intend to make the most of the opportunity the Fellowship presents me to benefit from the tools and methodology of performance auditing. I am also interested in techniques for examining and understanding the accounts of public organizations, financial analysis and greater mastery of advanced IT tools.

The impact I hope to make as a graduate Fellow

With the experience and knowledge I acquire, I plan to carry out an initial performance audit on entities falling within the scope of the Local Authorities Chamber. I will also share my experience with other colleagues, to stimulate a new dynamic focused on performance auditing in accordance with the Court's Strategic Plan.