Our vision
Better procurement for people and the planet.
The Open Contracting Partnership is an independent non-profit public charity 501(c)(3) working in over 50 countries.
We are a silo-busting collaboration across governments, businesses, civil society, and technologists to improve public procurement by designing goal-driven reforms, building coalitions of change and co-creating digital solutions, powered by open data. We are unique in bringing these three approaches together and at scale.
Over our 2019-2023 strategy cycle, our work had an indirect positive impact on an estimated 209 million lives and US$116 billion dollars of public spending.
We make sure public money is spent openly, fairly and effectively on public contracts, delivering fundamentally better public spending outcomes that benefit society. By improving US$2 trillion in public procurement spending, we think we can enable one billion people to live in more equitable, prosperous and sustainable communities by 2030.
We support people from government, business and civil society to make reforms stick, help their innovations jump scale, and foster a culture of openness around the policies, teams, tools, data, and results needed to deliver impact for communities and the planet.
Open Contracting Partnership helps transform procurement from an overlooked, underfunded paper-based chore to a digital, data-driven government service that can be an engine for innovation, sustainability and economic inclusion.
Our 2024-2030 Strategy
How we work
To meet our bold ambition for impact, we plan to support approximately 100 compelling projects on the ground, document and share what works to inspire others, and advocate globally to shape norms and build international support to scale innovations faster.
Supporting local changemakers is at the heart of our work and our theory of change. The level of support depends upon our partners’ capacity and needs, ranging from “light touch” assistance, to intensive, structured support like our Lift impact accelerator. We also adjust our level of support depending on our partners’ progress.
We will support government and civil society partners on compelling, locally-owned reforms that bring together multi-stakeholder teams to achieve goals around strengthening democratic institutions, social inclusion, or environmental sustainability and resilience. We will support partners in designing goal-driven reforms, building coalitions of change and co-creating digital solutions, powered by open data.
We want to build a global enabling environment that helps ambitious procurement reforms to proliferate.
Our local and international paths to impact are mutually reinforcing; every compelling project can inspire other reformers and build our evidence for global advocacy. Through our international advocacy, we use these insights and evidence to decisively shift global norms around procurement reform. We also invest in building, supporting, and documenting open source digital tools and methodologies.
Our governance
We are a global team of about 30 people, with a small executive team based in Washington, DC. We are governed by a Governing Board made up of a mix of renowned individuals from government, the private sector, civil society, the technology sector and development organizations. The Governing Board appoints and oversees our Executive Director and signs off on our strategy and our budget. It also contributes to fundraising and champions open contracting publicly.
Our team
Our values
Open
What we expect from government, we apply to ourselves too. We openly and honestly share what we are doing, from our contracts and our finances to our programmatic progress and challenges. We are also open to new ideas and collaborations. Our events and organizational processes should be inclusive and everyone should feel invited to participate. We recognize that this involves going the extra mile and taking a longer road to impact than just working with governments, but it also makes the results more robust and sustainable.
Bold
To reach our ambitious goals for transforming the world’s largest marketplace, we have to be bold. We push for transformational change (open-by-design) rather than being content with incremental or superficial improvements. We aren’t after just a bit more transparency, we want a fundamental improvement in how business is done. Public contracts seem boring so we have to make them interesting and uncover the vital issues at stake. We have to call out the myths and be steadfast without being insensitive or inflexible.
Curious
To overcome vested interests and to change the status quo, we have to be creative. We take chances on new approaches and new ideas. We explore new ways to solve problems and build new collaborations and alliances. We create space for testing, failure and adaptation. We run with our winners, fess up and learn from our mistakes, and report on what we learned on the way.
People-centered
The whole purpose of procurement is to serve citizens and deliver results for communities, government and businesses alike. To get there, we work with and through local partners, meeting them where they are, and lifting up their experience and expertise. We also want our partners to enjoy working with us and to find joy in the work we do together.
And we hope to do all this in a fun way. We celebrate our successes and those of our awesome partners.
We are passionate about our work and caring about the people making all of this happen.
