Jan van Schalkwyk

About Jan van Schalkwyk

Jan van Schalkwyk is an institutional capacity-development practitioner, facilitator and co-designer with close to thirty years of experience at the Auditor-General of South Africa. His career has crossed auditing, audit methodology, training and development, human-resource management, strategy, international affairs, donor funding, stakeholder engagement and external partnerships. One of the defining projects of his career was helping establish AGSA’s fully in-house trainee auditor scheme. The work began in the late 1990s and developed into an accredited professional pipeline capable of recruiting and developing young professionals internally. His later work extended into the international audit community through INTOSAI, where he chaired the Task Force on INTOSAI Auditor Professionalisation and led work connected to competency frameworks, professional-development pathways and auditor competence. Jan also helped lead the team that drafted ISSAI 150 on Auditor Competence and its related guidance. His experience has given him a distinctive perspective on the relationship between developing individuals and building institutions: capability requires an appropriate environment, credible standards, a pipeline of competent and empowered people, and willingness to submit performance to meaningful evaluation. After concluding his approximately thirty-year AGSA career in 2025, Jan established Uadilifu Consult. He is now selectively applying his experience to leadership development, institutional capacity development, facilitation, mentoring, cross-sector collaboration and the co-design of interventions that move organisations from identifying problems towards building solutions.

Key message

Strong leaders matter, but strong institutions matter longer. Leadership shortages rarely appear suddenly; organisations often discover too late that they stopped building leaders years earlier. Professionalisation requires more than training: institutions need an enabling environment, clear norms and standards, a pipeline of competent and empowered people, and credible internal and external evaluation. Sustainable institutional capability is created through systems, partnerships and long-term development rather than isolated interventions. Public, private, academic and civil-society actors can collaborate without sacrificing their distinct roles or independence. Institutional problems need to move beyond diagnosis towards practical solutions.

Speaking topics and expertise

• Leadership pipelines and succession
• Professionalisation and institutional capability
• Building sustainable institutional capacity
• Cross-sector collaboration between public
• private and civil-society actors
• Moving from diagnosis to delivery
• Integrity as institutional practice
• Developing competent and empowered professionals
• Public accountability
• Institutional leadership
• Capability versus compliance
• Building professional pipelines from the ground up
• Mentoring and leadership-transfer strategies