Data Strategies Playbook
Today, DG is pleased to announce the publication of our latest white paper, Designing Data Strategies: A Playbook for Action.
In this paper, we have identified six components for the design and operationalization of institutional data strategies: This work aims to distill lessons learned from Development Gateway’s research and collaboration, designing data strategies with development and humanitarian agencies. In the current ‘data revolution’ era, data and digital are both a strategic asset and a source of institutional risk.
Strategies should be designed using:
- a holistic approach,
- intentional leadership positioning, and
- a focus on the “right” investments.
Strategies should be operationalized through:
- responsible data practice,
- shared data use practices, and
- an appropriate governance plan.
We are continuously learning from our partners across various agencies, and hope this will be a useful starting point that may be adapted by organizational leaders to drive effective digital and data strategies in their institutional contexts.
Feedback about the approach outlined in this paper is welcome! Continue the conversation on social media using #DataStrategyPlaybook or by tagging @dgateway.
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The Future of Technology Governance and Global Development: Why DG Brought DataReady In-house
DG is excited to announce we now have more robust data governance advisory services with the recent integration of DataReady.
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Launching the Early Grade Education Activity (ASAS) Program: A Collaborative Project from IREX and DG
IREX and Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) are pleased to announce their collaborative work on the USAID-funded Early Grades Education Activity (ASAS) program, which launched in August 2023 and will run through July 2028. This blog explores how the ASAS program will empower teachers, universities, communities, and stakeholders within Jordan’s Ministry of Education and throughout the country to deliver inclusive and holistic early-grade education for Jordanian students from kindergarten to grade three in order to strengthen numeracy and literacy skills.
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At a Glance | Tracking Climate Finance in Africa: Political and Technical Insights on Building Sustainable Digital Public Goods
In order to combat the effects of climate change, financing is needed to fund effective climate fighting strategies. Our white paper, “Tracking Climate Finance in Africa: Political and Technical Insights on Building Sustainable Digital Public Goods,” explores the importance of climate finance tracking, common barriers to establishing climate finance tracking systems, and five insights on developing climate finance tracking systems.
Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) “At a Glance” series explores the highlights in DG’s white papers and other publications. In this installment of the series, we explore the white paper titled “Tracking Climate Finance in Africa: Political and Technical Insights on Building Sustainable Digital Public Goods,” which was written by Dr. Catherine Weaver from the University of Texas at Austin and Tom Orrell, previously of DataReady and now a Deputy Director of Programs at DG. Weaver and Orrell explore the importance of climate finance tracking (CFT), common barriers to establishing climate finance tracking systems, and five insights on developing climate finance tracking systems.
What is Climate Finance and a Climate Finance Tracking system?
In order to combat the effects of climate change, financing is needed to fund effective climate fighting strategies, including funding to develop tools, programming, etc. that aim to equip governments and communities to predict, prevent, and address the needs provoked by climate change. Overall, climate finance is funding aimed at not only bringing the world closer to compliance with such climate policy as the 2015 Paris Agreement but is also aimed at protecting individuals and communities who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A climate finance tracking system is the planned process(es) and infrastructure supporting the tracking and monitoring of climate financing so that its impact can be tracked, analyzed, and (when appropriate) advanced or duplicated.
The first barrier to climate finance and creating a climate finance tracking system is that the definition of climate finance is often subject to debate because of politically motivated contestation and ambiguity over what activities are directly or indirectly motivated by climate change concerns. Therefore, the first step in establishing a climate finance tracking system is arriving at a consensus amongst stakeholders (including countries, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society) on what counts as climate change activity.
Once a common definition of climate change activity—and therefore, what constitutes climate finance—is established, a climate finance tracking system is needed in order to ensure climate finance is appropriately utilized and to track impact. While the specifics of what a climate finance tracking system looks like depends on the context in which it’s established, such a system can include tools like DG’s Aid Management Platform, an open-source tool that facilitates the monitoring of development activities in order to enhance aid effectiveness by allowing stakeholders to track activities from planning to implementation, and GIZ’s TruBudget, a collaborative and secured platform to track and coordinate the implementation of donor-funded investment projects. (Learn more about these tools and climate finance here.)
However, in order for any tools in a climate finance tracking system to be effective, the context in which the system is being established will ideally have many components, including digital infrastructure, human and computational capacity, data and accounting literacy, and complementary institutions and policies to ensure climate data is usable and useful for decision-making. Therefore, significant resources are needed in order for a climate finance tracking system to be effectively implemented. Here is an overview of five insights DG has identified on how best to create a climate finance tracking system.
- Creating a climate finance tracking system is not only a technical endeavor but also a political one. Any type of data, including climate finance data, is inherently political. Therefore, in order to build a viable and sustainable climate finance tracking system, stakeholders must first and foremost approach this as a political task.
- Building a climate finance tracking system will involve reaching consensus on how to standardize definitions, measurements, methods of reporting, and other data requirements. In the instance of climate finance tracking, the list of stakeholders to be included in this endeavor is long, as public, private and civil society stakeholders may express different needs and preferences when it comes to tracking and reporting data.
- Building a climate finance tracking system at the national level requires (a) a concerted investment of time and resources to create accessible and usable technical systems that capture critical information as well as (b) the human capacity and (c) political willingness to sustain it.
- Ensure different budgetary tools are interoperable (i.e., data can be shared seamlessly between systems) in order to avoid data silos and to facilitate the exchange of information between aid, procurement, budget, and other data systems in the climate finance tracking system.
- Creating climate finance tracking systems requires planning from the subnational to the transnational levels. Subnational political will and capacity will have to be carefully cultivated as this is where most money is spent. At the national level, efforts to build robust climate finance tracking systems will also need to coordinate with efforts at transnational levels, especially to empower the tracking of regional resources and spillover effects of national programs.
Dive deeper into these insights and learn more about climate finance tracking and climate finance tracking systems in the white paper.
Explore our white papers
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Evidence-Informed Policymaking: Education Data-Driven Decision Mapping in Kenya and Senegal
Between December 2022 and February 2024, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) and IREX, funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, conducted research in Kenya and Senegal to explore the complexities of education data supply, access, and decision-making processes. Effective decision-making in education relies on reliable, comparable, and accessible data managed through efficient information systems, facilitating resource optimization and goal monitoring. However, many countries, including Kenya and Senegal, experience challenges with unreliable education data, limited data utilization for decision-making, and insufficient national capacity to manage and leverage data effectively. The research, employing DG's Custom Assessment and Landscape Methodology (CALM), involved a desk review, stakeholder consultations, interviews, and validation workshops. Rather than an evaluation or comprehensive diagnostic, the study aimed to gather diverse perspectives and stories from stakeholders to contribute to ongoing discussions, technical investments, and reform efforts. We present key findings in Kenya and Senegal, before comparing and identifying shared characteristics that may be useful to assess in other country contexts.
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Élaboration De Politiques Fondées Sur Des Données Probantes: Élaboration De Politiques Fondées Sur Des Données Probantes
Entre décembre 2022 et février 2024, Development Gateway : an IREX Venture (DG) et IREX, avec le financement de la Fondation William & Flora Hewlett, ont mené des recherches au Kenya et au Sénégal pour étudier la complexité des mécanismes de fourniture des données sur l'éducation, l'accès aux données et les processus de prise de décision. Une prise de décision efficace dans le domaine de l'éducation repose sur des données fiables, comparables et accessibles, gérées par des systèmes d'information tout aussi efficaces, facilitant ainsi l'optimisation des ressources et le suivi des objectifs. Cependant, de nombreux pays, dont le Kenya et le Sénégal, sont confrontés à des défis liés au manque de fiabilité des données sur l'éducation, à une utilisation limitée des données dans la prise de décision et à la faiblesse de la capacité nationale à gérer et à exploiter les données de manière efficace. Cette étude, qui utilise la méthodologie CALM (Custom Assessment and Landscape Methodology) de DG, comprend un examen documentaire, des consultations avec les parties prenantes, des entretiens et des ateliers de validation. Plutôt que de réaliser une évaluation ou un diagnostic complet, l'étude visait à recueillir des points de vue et des récits diversifiés auprès des parties prenantes afin de contribuer aux discussions en cours, aux investissements techniques et aux réformes entreprises. Nous présentons les principaux résultats obtenus au Kenya et au Sénégal avant de comparer et d'identifier les caractéristiques communes qui pourraient s’avérer utiles d'évaluer dans d'autres contextes nationaux.
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Tracking Climate Finance in Africa: Political and Technical Insights on Building Sustainable Digital Public Goods
In this new white paper, we explore the importance of climate finance tracking (CFT), common barriers to establishing climate finance tracking systems, and five insights on developing climate finance tracking systems.
Building Procurement Back, Better
This is the third blog in a three-part series exploring how governments can build resilient procurement systems. Development Gateway has been working on a project for the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Global Digital Marketplace Programme and the Prosperity Fund Global Anti-Corruption Programme, led by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), which included the topic of Covid-19 procurement response.
Read the full Emergency Procurement: Lessons Learned from Covid-19 report, and read blogs one and two in this series.
The IMF predicts the global economy will shrink by 4.9% this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a Gartner market analysis, the global IT market will shrink by 8% in the next year as a result of the recession.
However, the government technology market is expected to be more resilient, shrinking by only 0.6%. In fact, two government technology sectors – IT services and software – are predicted to grow in 2020 despite the severe global economic downturn.
How is government digital transformation growing, rather than shrinking?
As governments look to “build back better,” we can expect an influx of government spending to stimulate the economy, and a shift in priority goods and services to purchase. As the world transitions from emergency response to recovery, governments’ focus will shift from using technology to procure other products (as we described in our first blog in this series), to procuring technology products themselves. For example, Covid-19 has underscored the need for digital governance: not only digitizing government processes and workforces, but also the services provided to citizens — including education, health, registration authorities, housing and citizenship applications, etc.
Covid-19 has accelerated government digitization efforts across the globe as Ministries of Education shift to online learning, Ministries of Health roll out telemedicine services, and government employees continue to telework and access secure government servers via the cloud. Digital transformation is no longer a choice, but a core need. Working on extremely short timelines, to meet an entirely new set of needs, governments have relied heavily on existing and new digital solutions to meet increasing demands. However, longer-term investments in government digital service delivery require more rigorous procurement and design considerations.
Digitalization to support and rehabilitate local economies
Increased government spending on digital and IT services will not only streamline public service delivery, but also stimulate the economy. Redirecting government spending to domestic IT suppliers and local SMEs provides the added benefit of supporting local economies as they begin to rebuild from the initial shock of Covid-19. This presents a ripe opportunity to create jobs and stimulate the economy – but understanding who well-qualified domestic IT suppliers are, and the barriers they face to engaging with public procurement processes, is critical for making sustainable and effective investments. For example, the Indonesian Ministry of Health and National Standardisation Agency are relaxing noise restrictions on ventilators so that domestic manufacturers can speed up production. Adaptive and flexible procurement policy reforms such as these can help ensure efficient government spending during, and after, an emergency. Created in partnership with the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, DG’s indicator framework is a tool that can help governments understand and take smaller steps from their current “as-is” state to get to their desired “to-be” state of digital procurement reform.
The path – and the tools – to rebuilding responsibly
Moving forward, global government buyers that seek to procure digital solutions must take lessons from Covid-19 into account regarding user needs and holistic approaches.
Fortunately, the body of resources for governments looking to build resilient digital solutions is growing. For example, buyers can refer to OECD research and digital strategies to consider how policy compliments digitization; draw on knowledge from Australia and the United Kingdom which have both put together criteria/codebooks on digital service delivery; and prioritize user-centered design principles to ensure that digital solutions are used, useful, and build resilience.
The Emergency Procurement Report: Lessons Learned from Covid-19 report and indicator framework are key resources for country governments looking to responsibly adapt procurement operations to address Covid-19. We encourage wide use of the tool to identify where to strengthen procurement responses during emergencies, sustain government services, and support the economy during and post-crisis.
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Resilience by eDesign: Digital Emergency Procurement
In a global emergency, public spending helps acquire materials to respond to the crisis, and stimulates the economy to assist with post-crisis recovery. In recent months, DG set out to understand what public procurement policies, contracting mechanisms, and data and digital capabilities were required to procure a rapid and effective emergency response.
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Procurement Data and COVID-19: Buying Smarter in a Crisis
Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions.
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When Covid-19 Confirms the Need for Open Contracting in Senegal
Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars through public procurement of goods and services – without a focus on accountability, much can be lost through waste or corruption. Today, more than ever, transparency in public procurement and Open Contracting is needed in Senegal and around the world as governments respond to and recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Kenya, Open Contracting Improves Efficiency & Curbs Corruption
On 31st August 2020, President Uhuru Kenyatta directed the Ministry of Health to come up with a transparent, open method and mechanism through which all tenders and procurement done by Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (KEMSA) will be available online. The directive follows allegations of corruption in the procurement of COVID-19 emergency supplies.
With citizens’ lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing KEMSA’s procurement in response to COVID-19. Open procurement data can help in improving the efficiency of emergency procurement and support civil society groups to detect corruption and monitor the effectiveness of service delivery.
“This level of transparency and through the use of technology will go a very long way in ensuring that we have the confidence of our people that those placed in institutions are able to manage the resources of the Kenyan taxpayer plus our development partners in an open and transparent manner” – President Uhuru Kenyatta
Much can be learned from Makueni County in Kenya, a county that publishes and uses open, accessible, and timely information on government contracting to engage citizens and businesses. The Makueni Open Contracting Portal is an interactive site built by Development Gateway (DG) that provides detailed information on each step of the tender, award, and contract implementation process at the county level. These steps are now recorded within the interactive Makueni Open Contracting Portal – making information available for citizens at each step of the process. The county plans to go a step further to publish all implementation data such as community monitoring reports, also known as PMC reports and supplier payment vouchers.
The goal of the portal is to improve the efficiency of public procurement management and support the delivery of higher-quality goods, works, and services for residents of Makueni County through enhanced citizen feedback.
What We Learned from Makueni County
Lesson 1: Public Data Improves Efficiency
The primary role of the Ministry of Health and KEMSA in Kenya during an emergency situation is to provide citizens timely, affordable, and efficient supplies and services. Digitizing and publishing procurement data will provide the Ministry insights on whether funding and services are reaching intended beneficiaries.
Publishing procurement data will also encourage better monitoring from relevant state and non-state actors. The Ministry of Health and KEMSA will have the opportunity to aggregate non-state actors’ feedback and state actor insights. This feedback will enable them to make data-driven decisions that will improve service delivery to citizens, promote efficient allocation of resources and ultimately saving costs.
DG has developed interactive M&E dashboards to support analysis currently used by Makueni County. The series of charts and visualizations provide helpful data insights – such as top suppliers that received contracts and the percentage of awards that go toward the Access to Government Procurement Opportunities (AGPO), which requires tenders to be awarded to women, youth, and people with disabilities.
Since the start of the use of the Makueni open contracting portal in 2019, improved resource utilization and efficiency in procurement has been identified by the County leadership. Governor Kivutha Kibwana cited that the County has saved Kes. 30,000,000 from the Roads department as a result of using the portal.
Lesson 2: Building Trust is Essential to Combating Corruption
The complexity of emergency responses such as COVID-19 requires cooperation between the private sector, national, and county government to ensure timely delivery of supplies. KEMSA publishing data will promote feedback and engagement of business and citizens further building trust and collaboration. Publishing procurement data also equips civil society and citizens with the information needed to help combat corruption. For example, reporting counterfeits, frauds, and scams – which has been a key corruption issue identified globally in COVID-19 response procurement, particularly PPEs.
DG has implemented its corruption risk dashboard in Makueni, which uses high powered analytics and global research to identify risk profiles for potential corruption in procurement. KEMSA can adopt the corruption risk dashboard as a red-flagging tool to assist in identifying procurement activities that merit in-depth auditing of corruption risk – including fraud, collusion, and process rigging – over time. These analytics will allow the organization to address cases of corruption before taxpayer money is lost.
Lastly, publishing Beneficial ownership data can enable governments to quickly perform minimal standards of due diligence on companies they are buying goods and services from. As well as reducing the immediate risk of corruption, beneficial ownership data provides a valuable trail for future audit.
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Connecting Digital Dreams to Infrastructure Needs: Three Lessons from the aLIVE Program
After eighteen months of implementing the aLIVE program, we’ve learned three lessons on how to best support our partners in Ethiopia, advance our work in data systems and management, and ultimately, reach our overall goal of supporting Ethiopia in achieving food security and building a more robust, independent economy.
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Case Study: Fostering Sustainable Agriculture through Data-Driven Collaboration and Partnership: Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria
Through DG’s Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program, we recently published a case study titled “Fostering Sustainable Agriculture through Data-Driven Collaboration and Partnership: Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria.” It dives deep into how the VIFAA program has impacted the fertilizer data and markets in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria. In this blog, we explore the overall impact that the VIFAA program is making, why the program was needed, and offer some key highlights from the case study.
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Stakeholder, Where Art Thou?: Three Insights on Using Governance Structures to Foster Stakeholder Engagement
Through our Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) program and its sister program Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA), we have learned that creating governance structures, such as advisory boards or steering committees, is one approach to ensuring that digital solutions appropriately meet stakeholders’ needs and foster future stakeholder engagement. In this blog, we explore three insights on how governance structures can advance buy-in with individual stakeholders while connecting them to one another.
Since Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) founding, we have prioritized working closely with multiple stakeholders—including everyone from local technical experts to government ministries and global partners—when developing digital solutions and gathering data. Through our Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) program and its sister program Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA), we have learned that creating governance structures, such as advisory boards or steering committees, is one approach to ensuring that digital solutions appropriately meet stakeholders’ needs and foster future engagement from them. In this blog, we explore three insights on how governance structures can advance buy-in with individual stakeholders while connecting them to one another.
Why Governance Structures?
Governance structures—which are best practice to have when conducting primary research—have been essential to DG’s tobacco control work, because many of our stakeholders have indicated their desire to be included throughout program implementation and not just at the end. Several have echoed the common refrain: “You can’t do something for us without us.” We’ve also found that governance structures help coordinate collaboration across our stakeholders, especially since we have a group of stakeholders with very different backgrounds, expertise, and areas of interest in our tobacco control work. These stakeholders also all have different perspectives and varied ways in which they engage with our work. Therefore, DG has formed various governance structures in both our TCDI program and DaYTA program.
The Role of Governance Structures in TCDI and DaYTA
DG formed two advisory boards in the first phase of TCDI: one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one in Zambia. These advisory boards ensure that stakeholders are updated when the program meets key milestones, including when data, needs assessments, and research protocol are validated; the boards also supported the launch of illicit trade studies in the DRC and in Zambia.
DG’s successful implementation of these governance structures in TCDI paved the way for the formation of the following governance bodies to support DaYTA:
- A new Advisory Board in the DRC (building off the one from TCDI),
- The Survey Implementation Group and the Youth Advisory Group in Nigeria, and
- The Research Advisory Committee in Kenya.
All of these structures have a similar composition and a shared mandate; each one consists of a small group of technical experts who provide technical direction and advice on the research implementation on youth tobacco use in Kenya, Nigeria, and the DRC.
DG also formed a steering committee in the DRC. Its purview is more strategic and less technical relative to the advisory board; it is led by a high-level public official from DRC’s Ministry of Health and includes stakeholders from civil society organizations, government, academia, and partners in tobacco control (like the World Health Organization) who are working to align the research with government policy.
Additionally, to ensure coordination across countries, we also convened a meeting of the full DaYTA consortium with representatives from all three countries—in-person to start, then a mix of virtual and in-person at key program milestones.
These governance structures have proved successful in giving stakeholders a clearly defined space in which to engage—both in a country-specific and cross-country manner. As we’ve implemented and improved our approach to these governance structures across TCDI and DaYTA, we’ve gathered three insights on how these structures can be beneficial for stakeholders and project implementers alike.
- Governance structures are time-saving mechanisms that support program implementation by creating space for trust building between partners at every level. This trust allows the government partner to validate the implementing partners’ actions with regional and local stakeholders. Specifically, when a government partner at the central level (e.g., a ministry of health) is part of a governance structure and is informed on the status of project work, they can provide support in facilitating program implementation by doing such things as providing letters of introduction at the beginning and signing off on the results at dissemination; their ongoing support helps ensure that stakeholders at every level know that the implementers’ project has the government’s support.
This support was especially crucial in the DRC. During the implementation of the illicit trade study during TCDI, the team encountered implementation challenges at the province level from officials who hadn’t been formally introduced to the program. Learning from this, we prioritized getting letters of introduction from the central ministry of health in advance of the youth data study on DaYTA, and the steering committee helped expedite its approval and signature. - Governance structures increase coordination and joint ownership. Stakeholder engagement is essential for long-term success of a program’s work and its long-term sustainability and use. Governance structures create lines of communication amongst stakeholders across sectors and in some cases, across countries. These communication lines foster a sense of joint ownership in the ultimate research output and the technical product that is created. Because this country-specific coordination is formalized and integrated from the beginning of the program, DG and our stakeholders alike hold each other accountable for working constructively towards a common goal. This coordination has been especially important for DaYTA in particular, since we are focused on getting buy-in from stakeholders in all three countries regarding the cross-country nature of the program.
As such, we kicked off program implementation with the full DaYTA consortium meeting, with five representatives from government, academia, and civil society organizations from each country, plus all of our implementing partners. To continue the collaboration (both within and across countries), we kicked off the formation of the various technical advisory bodies and also committed to reconvening the full group both virtually and in-person throughout program implementation. - Governance structures are not a one-size-fits-all solution and should be tailored based on stakeholders’ interests and expertise. Creating governance structures that segment stakeholders by audience, expertise, or interest allows stakeholders’ time and involvement to be more effective and conversations to be more productive. This tailored approach builds upon DG’s rich history of engaging various stakeholders in varying ways and has led to increased trust and flexibility by our stakeholders—because they see us taking significant steps to meet them where they are.
For example, the advisory board for the TCDI illicit trade study in the DRC was too large to be equally beneficial to all its members, and as a result, some non-technical members found the discussions to be overly technical and difficult to follow. So, for DaYTA, we split the stakeholder group into two groups based on interest, availability, and expertise. Similarly, in Nigeria, the governance bodies are separated by age, with a Survey Implementation Group for our traditional stakeholders and the Youth Advisory Group which is focused on engaging and capturing feedback from youth stakeholders.
Moving forward, DaYTA will monitor the progress and impact of these governance structures, keeping an eye on new developments and opportunities for further engagement. Stay tuned for more!
Procurement Data and COVID-19: Buying Smarter in a Crisis
This post is the second in a 3-part blog series focused on DG’s collaboration with the Global Digital Marketplace Programme. Read part one “Resilience by eDesign: Digital Emergency Procurement” here, and stay tuned for Blog 3 in which we’ll discuss building procurement back, better, after Covid-19.
Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions. With citizens’ lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing emergency response. Open procurement data can help civil society groups detect corruption and monitor the effectiveness of service delivery.
For example, In a bid to expedite PPE procurements and ensure timely availability of critical supplies, many countries moved to direct purchasing avenues that differ from traditional procurement. In some cases, “speed” has led to identified cases of corruption. In South Africa, this led to the government reverting back to its old procurement processes, and taking further steps to curb corruption and rebuild trust. These steps included publishing the identities of all winners of PPE contracts, rationale for selection, and names of losing bidders; the government also plans to publish the shareholder names of winning bidders.
The nature of Covid-19 requires rapid and informed resource allocation. Procurement data can help governments achieve this goal through understanding what priorities are; setting expectations for how much should be spent to achieve priorities; and ensuring suppliers are credible and can deliver.
First: knowing what and who to prioritize enables governments to focus scarce resources on purchasing the most critical items, and delivering them to communities most at risk.
Data from healthcare providers, sub-national and national procurement entities should be aggregated to understand needs and further inform budgeting. Publishing budget information and engaging with civil society can help authorities conduct spot-checks and ensure that funding and services are reaching intended beneficiaries.
Second: to curb price gouging, governments should publish up-to-date price lists for reference and use by all public procuring entities.
For example, as demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) soared in the early days of the crisis, so did PPE prices. Intermediary purchasers also flooded the market, looking to skim off profits by connecting desperate buyers with suppliers. Publishing information on prices, quantities of PPE distributed and engaging with civil society encourage citizens and procurement officers alike to monitor corruption risks.
Third: leveraging market intelligence – using data from existing procurement systems (such as IFMIS) and investing in new data sources – can speed up due diligence processes.
In many countries, procurement systems collect supplier data and efforts can be made to enhance this data to include financial solvency, sector qualifications, beneficial ownership information, and supplier performance evaluation(s). On its own, beneficial ownership data can enable governments to quickly perform minimal standards of due diligence on companies they are buying goods and services from. As well as reducing the immediate risk of corruption, beneficial ownership data provides a valuable trail for future audit.
Fourth: as mentioned throughout, publishing procurement data equips civil society and citizens with the information needed to help combat corruption.
For example, identifying and reporting fraudulent applications for relief funding; monitoring the use (or misuse) of emergency response funds; and reporting counterfeits, frauds, and scams. To enhance citizen oversight, the Government of Paraguay launched a mobile app that notifies users about everything the state procures during the Covid-19 emergency, from tender through award. In Makueni County, Kenya, Development Gateway is supporting the county government in enhancing the Makueni Open Contracting Portal (that publishes data in OCDS) to include Covid-19 procurement data. The County plans to tag all Covid-19 tender data in the system track and analyze this data to inform government decisions, and involve civil society and communities in the improvement of emergency procurement processes.
![]() ➙ pool purchase orders across government administrations; ➙ identify and select suppliers quickly; ➙ extract contract data for market intelligence; ➙ open data for public oversight and transparency; ➙ protect existing suppliers and long-term economic sustainability. |
Finally: while resources to build complex procurement data management systems may be difficult to mobilize, alternative data collection mechanisms can achieve much the same effect.
For example, standardized Excel templates or web forms that can be used to aggregate data from all relevant procurement entities. If open budget portals or websites do not exist, other tools and resources such as the Open Fiscal Data Package standardize the structure and the content of budget data so as to ensure data quality.
Another valuable resource for understanding how to collect and publish Covid-19 data is the Open Contracting Partnership’s guide to Covid-19 procurement data collection, publication, and visualization.
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Building Procurement Back, Better
As governments look to “build back better,” we can expect an influx of government spending to stimulate the economy, and a shift in priority goods and services to purchase. While the world transitions from emergency response to recovery, governments’ focus will shift from using technology to procure other products, to procuring technology products themselves.
![](https://developmentgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-09-01-at-9.55.56-AM-1.png)
Resilience by eDesign: Digital Emergency Procurement
In a global emergency, public spending helps acquire materials to respond to the crisis, and stimulates the economy to assist with post-crisis recovery. In recent months, DG set out to understand what public procurement policies, contracting mechanisms, and data and digital capabilities were required to procure a rapid and effective emergency response.
![](https://developmentgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/OC Graphs.jpg)
When Covid-19 Confirms the Need for Open Contracting in Senegal
Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars through public procurement of goods and services – without a focus on accountability, much can be lost through waste or corruption. Today, more than ever, transparency in public procurement and Open Contracting is needed in Senegal and around the world as governments respond to and recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Resilience by eDesign: Digital Emergency Procurement
Public procurement may not be the most exciting function of government bureaucracy – but in a global emergency, public spending helps acquire materials to respond to the crisis, and stimulates the economy to assist with post-crisis recovery. The UK Treasury has pledged over £15 billion for PPE procurement, and the US government spent $2.6 billion on Covid-19 response contracts between February and April 2020 alone.
Countries with user-friendly procurement technology were much better suited to ramp up purchasing as prices skyrocketed, exchange rates fluctuated, and distribution channels were interrupted. However, we know that digital technologies are not a panacea for better governance, and the market shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic have made this clear once again. Digital tools such as e-procurement need to be complemented by comprehensive strategies and policies that ensure user needs are met from a more holistic perspective.
In recent months with these digital and policy challenges top-of-mind, DG set out to understand what public procurement policies, contracting mechanisms, and data and digital capabilities were required to procure a rapid and effective emergency response. A holistic view of procurement data, digital, and policy needs during an emergency is captured in the public-facing Emergency Procurement: Lessons Learned from Covid-19 Report and accompanying Indicator Framework.
Today, we are excited to launch the Report and Indicator Framework.
![](https://developmentgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-09-01-at-9.55.56-AM.png)
Emergency Procurement Indicator Framework & Overview
Emergency Procurement Indicator Framework & Overview [prompts Excel download]
DG and the Global Digital Marketplace Programme’s Covid-19 Emergency Procurement Collaboration
Development Gateway has been working on a project for the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Global Digital Marketplace Programme and the Prosperity Fund Global Anti-Corruption Programme, led by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), which included the topic of Covid-19 procurement response. This work was completed through a combination of desk research, key informant interviews, and participation in public discussions and forums.
Innovation in Crisis: Creative Solutions to Emergency Procurement
Despite having a federal agency designated to emergency response coordination, the US’s emergency procurement system failed to account for the unprecedented market shocks presented by this pandemic: 1) its global scale, and 2) requirements for social distancing. Without a central purchasing hub or coordinated budget planning, state-level buyers in the United States competed against one another to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Supply chain risk protocols were not in place for local buyers to identify shipping disruptions, meaning city officials in Los Angeles and Boston had to hire private planes to retrieve PPE orders after disruptions to shipping lanes made normal market routes impossible.
Additionally, a majority of worldwide government services and procurement transactions – especially at the state level – are facilitated via face-to-face or paper-based systems. But even without fully-digitized procurement systems, we’ve observed many examples of creative solutions that assist governments in deploying a faster, more equitable pandemic response.
The following is a subset of tools that were launched to help governments navigate the high-risk and volatile Covid-19 market:
Demand Aggregation Tools | Supply Aggregation Tools | Digital Marketplaces | Open Data Platforms |
---|---|---|---|
Colombia expanded its open contracting portal, Colombia Compra Eficiente, to centralize procurement and incorporate a demand aggregation instrument | In South Africa, the state of KwaZulu-Natal created its own Covid-19 Supplier Database for its Public Health Department | Amazon Business created Covid-19 supply store for frontline medical personnel and emergency response organizations | Ecuador developed a public procurement search tool and called on the public to help monitor pandemic procurements for corruption, including a training video with information on how to register and report suspicious activity |
Malaysian civil society launched kitajagakita.com, a platform which matches people who want to help with people who need help | The UK government launched a webpage where UK businesses could offer coronavirus support | Gov shop is part of the US National Governors Association (NGA) Task Force on the Covid-19 supply chain, and is maintaining
a national registry of “verified” and vetted suppliers |
Moldova launched a Covid-19 procurement dashboard to allow the public to monitor pandemic spending |
In studying these solutions, we made a few key observations:
- Buying smarter and faster in an emergency requires tradeoffs – and procurement data can help governments make more informed purchasing decisions (the next post in this series will explore this in-depth!)
- Some rules preserve integrity, but others hamstring response – can any procurement regulations or contract terms become more flexible in crisis?
- Learning from success or failure can help build more resilient procurement systems – in many ways, Covid-19 can be seen as a “worst case scenario,” and inform priorities for future improvements. Further, although the pandemic is on an unprecedented scale, many user needs and data use cases would hold for any emergency, such as an earthquake.
e-Procurement Is a Means, Not an End
e-Procurement digitizes several phases of the government purchasing process for increased efficiency and time and cost savings, and many public procurement officers are urging their governments to make the shift if they have not already done so.
But it’s important to remember that digitalization in itself is not an end goal. This lesson has been underscored through the experiences of Public Procurement Officers charged with supplying a response to Covid-19. In order for procurement technology to be resilient to market shocks and domestic emergencies, it needs to take a holistic view of user needs.
This post is the first in a 3-part blog series focused on DG’s collaboration with the Global Digital Marketplace Programme. To learn more about how these procurement technologies can be more user-centered, stay tuned for Part 2 on what we learned about digital user needs and data use cases during this emergency.
Related Posts
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Procurement Data and COVID-19: Buying Smarter in a Crisis
Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions.
![](https://developmentgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mick-haupt-VE9DQ7zm22Y-unsplash-1000x750.jpg)
Building Procurement Back, Better
As governments look to “build back better,” we can expect an influx of government spending to stimulate the economy, and a shift in priority goods and services to purchase. While the world transitions from emergency response to recovery, governments’ focus will shift from using technology to procure other products, to procuring technology products themselves.
![](https://developmentgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/OC Graphs.jpg)
When Covid-19 Confirms the Need for Open Contracting in Senegal
Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars through public procurement of goods and services – without a focus on accountability, much can be lost through waste or corruption. Today, more than ever, transparency in public procurement and Open Contracting is needed in Senegal and around the world as governments respond to and recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.