Webinar: Open procurement in support of the COVID-19 recovery

The COVID-19 pandemic has Europe in crisis mode, with governments at all levels mobilized to purchase the urgently needed medical supplies to fight the virus. Never has public procurement been more important, both to respond to the crisis itself and to ensure value for money in the coming recovery phase. 

Europe has long been at the forefront of public procurement harmonization, but there are still opportunities to improve the quality and completeness of public procurement data and to improve coordination, vendor engagement, and civic oversight to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.

We’ve have seen how transparency and open data enabled countries to provide a single window for all their COVID-19 related contracts to identify, aggregate and analyze the most complete information about their supply chains and performance. Open contracting data has also helped governments to plan better, publish their stocks and anticipated needs to properly inform the market about future opportunities, helping with emergency management.  It has also supported direct monitoring of corruption risks in multiple countries. 

Better, more open and accountable public procurement systems will be central to rebuilding the devastated economies as the pandemic subsides. In shrunk economies, it is crucial to ensure that every Euro spent translates into maximum added value for the EU companies and citizens. The good news is that there is a lot of room for improvements and potential savings within public procurement. Even a small shift of 1% in efficiency can save the EU around EUR 20 billion per year. Business-as-usual will not be enough to achieve any of that.

We, the Ministry of the Interior of the Netherlands, Open Contracting Partnership, Hivos, and Open State Foundation are organizing a webinar on 7 July 2020. During the webinar, we will: 

• Share examples of how open procurement data publication is being used to more effectively respond to the Covid-19 crisis;
• Share upcoming plans and learn about tools and support to improve procurement data collection and publication;
• Learn about strategies to use contract registers and open data to improve business & civil society engagement in public contracting.

To register, please contact Karolis Granickas.