Counting on Each Other

A healthy economy needs a well-functioning accountancy profession, one supplying high-quality financial information produced by skilled professionals. These professionals are best supported by strong professional accountancy organizations (PAOs). A key success factor in achieving this is enhanced collaboration across the global, regional, and national levels of the accountancy profession and the involvement of the entire international development community.

Increasing numbers of PAOs are working together in a variety of ways, including long-term twinning arrangements, fixed-term donor funded projects, and a wide range of other partnerships, formal and informal, aimed at facilitating learning. There can be significant value in having a PAO share its experiences with another, telling the story of how it got to where it is, with the aim of coaching another PAO through the same process.

Based on real experiences, this guidance offers practical insights on how to approach partnerships between PAOs. Our focus is on approaching capacity building and identifying and managing partnerships (the “how”), and not the content of the capacity building itself (the “what”).