Despite significant donor funding, government accounting reforms seeking transparent and effective management of public resources often fail or have limited success, especially in Africa, prompting questions about donors’ implementation approach and calls for studies of successful reforms. This paper investigates a local government accounting reform in Benin supported by a German development agency–perceived as successful due to the participatory, pragmatic, and incremental approach reinforced by conditionalities in the face of neo‐patrimonial leadership.

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The INTOSAI Mexico Declaration provides a summary of good practice for the independence of government auditors. However, as in many parts of the world, this ideal is not achieved in many Sub-Saharan African countries. This includes both the English speaking and the French speaking countries. The picture is complex, especially in Francophone countries where there is usually more than one type of entity that provides some sort of audit function for central government. The roles and relative strengths of these different types of audit institution (usually Court of Accounts and General State Inspectorate) need to be clearly understood. This paper provides an introduction to their roles and considers their relative levels of independence against the INTOSAI guidance on independence from the Mexico Declaration. It concludes that, despite recent improvements, neither type of organisation achieves the levels of independence envisaged by INTOSAI nor are they adequately resourced. As a result co-operation between all public audit functions is more important than consideration of their relative levels of independence.