Community Call: Latin America, open contracting and COVID-19

Public procurement has become a central activity during the Covid-19 pandemic, with governments around the world buying all sorts of goods and services to address the crisis. In this context, transparency and accountability about the public contracts plays an important role not only in ensuring trust from key stakeholders but also to guarantee efficient processes and quality of the goods and services procured.

In many countries, the common challenge seems to be that people are not getting tested enough and even quickly enough owing to inconsistent access to/supply of test kits and PPE. Nations and their leaders are overwhelmed.

As proponents for open contracting and open public procurement, we thought having a conversation around COVID-19 and procurement in Latin America would be a good opportunity for us to exchange experiences and learnings on how to address emergency procurement and a way forward. The face of procurement in the health sector will definitely see a drastic change based on procurement responses in emergency scenarios. This is an offshoot from the global community call we had weeks ago with one of our call-to-actions being to contextualise the situation on a regional basis.

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