OCP in 2025: our plans for impact, inclusion, innovation plus a significant birthday
As 2025 unfolds, OCP’s work will be needed more than ever. Government accountability, climate resilience and supporting inclusive economies remain top priorities for leaders around the globe, and stronger public procurement will play a critical role in delivering on them.
Fortunately, our team is already hard at work helping you make public procurement better for everyone: we kicked off the year supporting reforms in Thailand and sharing how New York City is increasing participation and access to city contracts.
Celebrating a decade of OCP
Amazingly, we turn 10 this year! When we started, we sought to put ourselves out of business in a few years by embedding the Open Contracting Data Standard into global best practices. Instead, we fell in love with the challenge of transforming one of government’s most essential but overlooked, unloved, and underappreciated functions. And we heard clearly from our community that this was just the kind of partner they were looking for. We moved from transparency to transformation.
We will kick off our birthday celebration as OCP in March with stories about real people that show the transformative power of procurement reform for citizens who rely on essential services or a small business trying to win a government contract for the first time.
Reflecting on 2024
It’s humbling to me that I would have the honor of leading an organization that in 2024 alone worked with amazing local partners to:
- empower residents in Buenos Aires’ informal neighborhoods,
- double the users of Mexico City’s bike share service for the same cost,
- provide business opportunities for small businesses in Paraguay, women entrepreneurs in Uganda and under-represented and small firms in Boston,
- set the standard for sustainable infrastructure procurement in Chile,
- support Indonesia’s oversight institutions get better results from public spending; and
- go all-in on supporting Ukraine’s DREAM ecosystem to ensure a collaborative, fair and accountable reconstruction.
Annual feedback survey insights
As always, we will start the year by reflecting on our annual feedback survey results. Your input is invaluable, and we can’t wait to share the detailed results with you next week.
We received 236 responses, fairly equally from every continent where we work. We’re humbled to learn that 88% of you recommend working with us. You told us you gained new knowledge and skills, averaging 7.5 on a scale of 1-10: we owned up to undershooting our targets here in previous years so we are delighted to have made progress, mostly by focusing on fewer, more impactful interventions as per our new strategy. You also rated our resources an excellent very useful (8.3 out of 10), too, and you asked us for more case studies and opportunities to exchange and collaborate. Read on for some of our plans on this…
Your top priorities for 2025 include making AI work in public procurement, implementing anti-corruption strategies, and building better e-procurement systems.
You also told us you care about using, analyzing, and visualizing procurement data, making the case for open contracting and better procurement, and designing open contracting reforms related to social impact outcomes.
2025 plans
As we take these insights and the energy into 2025, here are some upcoming resources, events and programs we’re planning for the year to meet those needs.
January: We’re launching a new report with Mastercard Strive on better competition for small businesses and will publish a case study from our Lift impact accelerator on empowering women-owned businesses to win more contracts in Uganda.
February: The UK’s new public procurement regime goes live. It will be the first G7 economy that puts the OCDS at the center of its plans to improve procurement practice and performance. We’ll also share best open contracting practices from cities across the United States.
March: We will formally kick off celebrating 10 years of OCP as our global team comes together for our strategic retreat. We will have a big focus on the beneficiaries of open contracting throughout the month and will have a host of stories and resources to share with you.
April: Our work with India’s amazing CivicDataLab is now helping five Indian states to better assess flood risks and prioritize spending for their most vulnerable communities. In April, we will launch our underlying disaster risk reduction tool so it can be scaled and replicated to foster innovation and impact across Asia and beyond.
May: We expect reflections on and reveal of the EU’s plan to update its Public Procurement Directive. We will be working hard with our EU allies to embed open data and better, more agile contracting practices into the world’s largest single procurement market.
June: In Mexico, we’ve been helping Nuevo León go digital with a new local, accountable and effective e-GP system and we plan to expand that to other states in the summer. We will also be making the case for better public procurement as a cross-cutting priority public financial management reform for the SDGs at the Financing for Development Conference in Spain.
July: The next Ukraine Reconstruction Conference will be in Rome where we’ll showcase DREAM’s role in ensuring accountability and effective spending. In 2024, DREAM captured $4bn in projects; it now has over $14bn and counting!
August: We are partnering with George Washington University Law School on a summer webinar series on open contracting impact and case studies.
September: Your number one ask in our feedback survey was for more guidance around AI. Aligning with this request, one of our big research projects this year will be practical resources and guidance to procure better AI technology. We aim to share our ideas and insights for public feedback in September.
October: We plan for a big reveal on the impacts of our work in Rwanda and Tanzania to embed red flags and risk monitoring into public procurement reforms and make public contracts more accessible to smaller businesses. We also plan a 10-year celebration at OGP’s Global Summit in Spain to come together and reflect on our progress and how we can have even more impact over the next 10 years!
November: The trillions of dollars needed to address the financing needs of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts will be a hot topic as the UN Climate Change Conference COP 30 convenes in Belém, Brazil. We will showcase the procurement reforms we support in Brazil and our work to buy green and deliver better climate-resilient infrastructure, including an update on Lithuania’s strategy to go 100% green in procurement.
December: We will build on the UN Convention Against Corruption’s first-ever resolution on public procurement, working with UNODC to present a practical implementation guide based on global best practices at the Conference of States Parties in Doha.
So bring on 2025! Throughout the year, we will showcase our impact and progress stories that should move us toward our ambitious target of better procurement for one billion people by 2030. Sign up for our newsletters to stay updated and get engaged!
