African Auditing and Assurance: a mixed-methods study of African Auditing and Assurance mechanisms and measurable outcomes across African contexts

Auditing in Africa expands in coverage while assurance often remains weakly binding, creating a puzzle in which formal adoption of International Standards on Auditing coexists with uneven reporting credibility and public accountability. the present analysis reframes that puzzle as a problem of mechanisms under constraint rather than a deficit of standards, distinguishing auditor capacity, governance mediation and enforcement credibility as separate channels through which assurance may or may not alter behaviour. Drawing on agency, institutional and audit-quality scholarship, it develops a bounded conceptual framework tailored to fragmented oversight regimes, concentrated ownership, capacity-constrained regulators and large informal economies. Its central contribution is a fully specified mixed-methods protocol that pairs comparative archival indicators with field-based inquiry into audit committees, audit firms and supreme audit institutions, showing how qualitative and quantitative strands would be integrated without claiming executed fieldwork. The protocol clarifies which outcomes can be credibly attributed to assurance and which cannot, offering a disciplined basis for future comparative work.