For Immediate Release
Friday, September 30, 2022
More than 50 representatives of civil society and mass media gathered today at Tenderfest 2022, a two-day event to discuss opportunities for oversight of public procurement. The participants worked on identifying areas for collaboration, including on such efforts as conducting joint investigations to identify corruption schemes in public procurement. The event was jointly organized by the Open Contracting Partnership, the Public Association “Precedent Partnership Group,” and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
During her welcome remarks Forum for Transparency and Accountability in Public Procurement (PPTAF) member Mrs. Estebesova B.A. noted: “By joining forces to strengthen oversight of the Kyrgyz Republic procurement system, civil society and media can help ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely and transparently”.
During the two days, the participants discussed the importance of openness of public procurement and its monitoring and the role of the Forum for Transparency and Accountability in Public Procurement in these efforts. The presentations also discussed the establishment of a community platform to monitor public procurement and how to promote a roadmap for public procurement efficiency. Discussions were also held around how to automatically generate red flags based on data in open contracting data standard format.
According to the journalist Mr. Davurov, “previously everyone fought against corruption schemes alone, now the civil society and mass media communities have a great opportunity to unite our efforts for more effective monitoring of public procurements.” He further noted “in addition to building relationships, during Tenderfest we received useful feedback from our civil society counterparts on some of the monitoring tools we use for automatic detection of suspicious bids, which we will use to improve our tools.”
USAID’s Fiscal Accountability and Sustainable Trade project, implemented by DevTech Systems, Inc., played an integral role in organizing Tenderfest. The project has been supporting the Government to improve the efficiency and transparency of public procurement and enable civic engagement and oversight of the public procurement system.
For more information, please contact Niaz Shinwari at nshinwari@devtechsys.com.
