Open Contracting Partnership and EBRD announce alliance to amplify civil society voices in procurement reforms

London, 14 February 2020 — Valentine’s Day is a good time to appreciate your partners, so we are very happy to be in London today with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

We’re signing a Memorandum of Understanding (or MoU) to work together to embed local civil society participation into the public procurement reforms supported by the EBRD technical assistance. As many of you know, the EBRD has been a big cheerleader of the Open Contracting Data Standard and has supported putting the schema at the heart of new e-procurement systems in Ukraine, Moldova, the Kyrgyz Republic, and many others. The Bank has created a set of methodologies and business intelligence tools that can help speed up and deliver more systemic digital transformation reforms. Here is a great blog summarising this approach by the EBRD’s Eliza Niewiadomska.

Our new MoU with the Bank is led by the EBRD Civil Society Engagement Unit in close collaboration with the Legal Transition Programme and intends to create a framework for enlisting civil society organisations to support public procurement reforms and use open data to monitor procurement and improve frontline services and public probity. We plan to work together to:

• advocate for public procurement reforms to create open, transparent, and competitive public procurement regulatory frameworks that deliver value for money in the use of public funds;
• engage with civil society in public procurement reforms and support the use of open data;
• integrate an open contracting approach in public procurement reform strategies and design;
• support governments in the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard.

There will be a focus on creating Open Contracting communities, like Dozorro in Ukraine, and building and documenting open-source approaches and tools, and supporting our many partners in the region to use them. You can already see some compelling results in the Kyrgyz Republic and Moldova.

We’re delighted to be building on our successful collaboration with the EBRD and are looking forward to deepening our support to reformers and allies inside and outside of government, especially from civil society, the media and businesses. Together we can create stronger reforms that are centred around the use of data, and in turn, result in better outcomes for citizens.

Read the full Memorandum of Understanding (PDF):