Rome, 4 June 2026 — The CGIAR Independent Advisory and Evaluation Service (IAES) hosted the CGIAR Joint Assurance Workshop, a full-day exchange bringing together senior staff from across CGIAR’s assurance and advisory functions.
The workshop took place at an important moment for CGIAR, following the recent completion of staffing for three partnership-level assurance executive roles:
- Elbert Hidding, Integrated Partnership Internal Audit Executive
- Georgios Solomos, Integrated Partnership Risk and Internal Controls Executive
- Monde Magolo, Integrated Partnership Ethics and Business Conduct Executive
Their engagement, together with IAES leadership and advisory functions, provided an opportunity to strengthen dialogue on how CGIAR’s assurance ecosystem can work more coherently across the integrated partnership.
IAES participation included Allison Grove Smith, IAES Director; Amy Beaudreault, ISDC Secretariat Lead; Ibtissem Jouini, IAES Senior Evaluation Manager; Gaia Gullotta, IAES Evaluation Analyst. A communal lunch with the broader IAES-assurance team and senior staff from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT rounded out the day.
Discussions focused on areas of common interest and common concern across assurance and advisory functions, including stakeholder expectations, assurance mandates, inter-functional links, external dependencies, the Multi-Year Evaluation Plan, combined assurance relationships and ways of working, and joint action planning for engagement with government bodies (SIMEC; Global leadership team, GLT; Audit, Finance, and Risk Committee, AFRC).
Combined assurance brings together complementary perspectives across evaluation, science quality, audit, risk, and ethics. By connecting these functions more effectively, CGIAR will strengthen the way it brings together evidence, oversight, learning, accountability, and decision-making.
The workshop highlighted practical opportunities for CGIAR’s assurance and advisory functions to share plans, information, and results. These areas of collaboration are central to strengthening the value proposition of combined assurance for CGIAR as an integrated partnership.
IAES’ participation reinforced the importance of working across assurance professions to support a more coherent, transparent, and learning-oriented system — one that helps CGIAR make better decisions for research for development.
