Four teams win Open Contracting Innovation Challenge with projects that promote competition and savings

The Open Contracting Partnership is proud to announce the winners of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Innovation Challenge, a competition that supports the development of innovative tools based on open data on public procurement in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova. 

Each of the winning teams will receive US$15,000 to implement their technological solutions. These funds, as well as OCP’s mentoring support, will help the winners realize their ideas for more fair, transparent, and efficient public procurement in their countries.

The Open Contracting Innovation Challenge winners are:

Kazakhstan

The Datanomix team started the Challenge with a system that can detect specific risk indicators in public procurement procedures. During the Challenge, they developed a customer relationship management (CRM) system that focuses on detecting unreasonable restrictions on competition in public procurement, and automatically generates and sends letters to alert government procurement entities and regulatory authorities. The system will also track the outcome of these notifications and future cost savings. Now Datanomix plans to create a coalition of non-governmental actors to encourage the state to rely less on direct awards and more on competitive procedures.

Moldova

Revizia.md is a risk indicator engine developed by the Moldovan NGO “AGER”, and is based on open data sourced from the electronic public procurement system MTender. The team identified over 30 red flags that may occur at different stages of the public procurement process. The public version of Revizia.md, which is set to be launched in October, will include records for all suppliers and procuring entities in Moldova. The risk indicator system will be used to advocate for better state monitoring of public procurement.

Kyrgyzstan 

In Kyrgyzstan, the prize will be divided between two teams.

BAA.kg built a tool to compare the price of medicine procurements. The analytical dashboard allows users to see the minimum, average and maximum prices per unit of each drug purchased by public entities in Kyrgyzstan, as well as which suppliers offer the best price. In the future, the BAA.kg team will add wholesale and retail prices for medicines to the analysis. The insights provided by such a tool will be invaluable for procuring entities, suppliers, and civil society who wish to ensure patients have access to affordable treatments.

Kloop Media created a set of 14 red flags that identify corruption risks in public procurement. The risk indicators – which were developed using the OCDS Red Flags methodology and others designed by the Kloop team – identify links between suppliers, as well as suppliers and government officials in Kyrgyzstan. Based on this data, Kloop Media will create an alert mechanism to automatically notify regional journalists, lawyers, non-governmental actors, and control agencies when risky procedures are detected.

The Open Contracting Innovation Challenge was launched in April 2021 in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova with the support of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Open Government Partnership, and the BHP Foundation. 

Teams participated in two incubation stages to improve their solutions. On 10 September, the finalists pitched the MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) of their tools, and shared their progress and plans for their further implementation. The jury, which consisted of OCP experts, international donors, representatives of IT associations, and authorities in each country, determined the winners based on their projects’ potential for impact, innovation, sustainability, and teams’ capacities.

About the Open Contracting Partnership

The Open Contracting Partnership is a silo-busting collaboration across governments, businesses, civil society, and technologists to open up and transform government contracting worldwide. We bring open data and open government together to make public contracting fair and effective. Spun out of the World Bank in 2015, we are now an independent not-for-profit working in over 50 countries around the world. We help make reforms stick and innovations jump scale, and foster a culture of openness about the policies, teams, tools, data, and results needed to deliver impact.