Ghana procurement

THE PROJECT

Background

At its highest political level, the Government of Ghana decided to fundamentally reform its procurement system to ensure that efficient, fair and transparent public procurement decisions are made and that those that make them are held properly accountable.

In this context, Ghana established at the Ministry of Finance a working group called the Public Procurement Oversight Group (PPOG) which is chaired by the Chief Director of the Ministry of Finance and composed of senior Government officials, representatives of the private sector, procurement consultants and a representative of the World Bank.

The PPOG drafted a comprehensive “Public Procurement Act 2002” which is a state-of-the-art” procurement manual that, if fully implemented, will assure fair, efficient and transparent procurement decisions.

Overall Goal and Content

On the one hand, the project mainly aimed at accompanying and reinforcing the implementation of the new law mentioned hereabove.

On the other hand, the purpose of the Ghana/Swiss project was to track the change in procurement processes in Ghana and help it achieve more transparent and accountable procurement decisions.

Objectives

The project had three major objectives:

• Contribute to the speedy and efficient introduction of a new public procurement system that allows fair, transparent and efficient public procurement.
• Contribute, through the sharing of the Ghanaian experience, to the international effort to establish best practices for procurement and reform mechanisms.
• Foster international recognition for Ghana’s efforts to establish efficient transparent and accountable procurement procedures that will allow donor agencies to rely to a greater extend on national procurement procedures.

Activities

The Centre’s team delivered a nationwide procurement awareness training programme in collaboration with the International Trade Centre to ensure widespread comprehension of the new law.

A pilot procurement entity was selected to identify where the procurement reform would be implemented and procurement capacity further enhanced. Based on this pilot a compliance and performance monitoring system was built and used as the basis for a national benchmarking survey.

The national benchmarking survey thus gave a clear picture on procurement capacities/insufficiencies in Ghana and would be repeated overtime to track progress.

Periodic reports to the Government on identified issues allowed for remedial action.

The project was successfully terminated a year later than envisaged but within budgetary limits.

Assessment

The project was very successful in the setting up of a methodology and a framework to monitor objectively the procurement process throughout Ghana through a sample survey by the competent authorities and by instituting an objective information system which allowed to retrace procurement decisions and responsibilities.

The methodology was recognized as state-of-the-art processes by the OECD and other international fora. Moreover, Ghanaian procurement experts became internationally involved in the process of helping other African countries to develop procurement monitoring systems.