Posts categorized Procurement

Procurement deserves a strategic seat at the top table across all of the Italian G20 presidencies. Anti-corruption priorities and open contracting solutions can drive progress in a number of areas.

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.

With citizens' lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing procurement in response to COVID-19. Last week, 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 will be available online. Much can be learned from DG's experience implementing an Open Contracting Portal in Makueni County, Kenya.

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.

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.

Chaque année, les gouvernements dépensent des milliards de dollars, dans la commande publique de biens et services - s’ils ne mettent pas en avant le concept de redevabilité, beaucoup de ressources peuvent être perdues au gaspillage ou à la corruption. Aujourd'hui, plus que jamais, la transparence dans les marchés publics, plus précisément la commande publique ouverte, est nécessaire au Sénégal et dans le monde, au moment les gouvernements se mobilisent pour lutter contre la pandémie du Covid-19 et essaient de s'en remettre, tout en s'efforçant de venir en aide aux populations les plus vulnérables. 

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.

Since 2017, DG has been working with the Government of Makueni County in Kenya and Hivos to improve the quality of procurement processes through an online portal that promotes transparency and accountability. The platform is different in that it provides county-level instead of national-level open contracting information. In this post, we highlight the technology behind the portal.

It’s not every day in the open technology space that the opportunity to be the very first at something arises. But last week, we were a part of the launch of the Government of Makueni County’s Open Contracting Portal – Kenya’s first sub-national open contracting portal.