Procurement monitoring initiative, the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) has called for greater transparency in the public procurement and contracting processes in Nigeria to better enhance citizen engagement with governmental projects.
This was made known at a media parley and private screening of its ‘Budeshi Waka’ documentary in Lagos over the weekend.
The Chief Executive Officer, PPDC, Seember Nyager, said that a level of feedback and monitoring would be achieved if adequate information about contracted projects is received by the citizens.
She emphasized the need for public institutions to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) to enable citizens monitor contracts from tender stage to implementation stage with a unique identifier.
The Communications Lead, PPDC, Ugochi Ekwueme, disclosed that the documentary was based on the community engagement tour embarked on by PPDC to verify the performance of health and education projects in Delta, Anambra, Kano, Edo and Benue states.
She said, “The idea behind Budeshi Waka came from the need to determine the extent to which awarded contracts have been beneficial to the communities and also to sensitize the community members on their role as citizens in ensuring value for money is attained with every contract that has been awarded.
“The documentary shows how these projects have affected the lives of citizens living in rural areas, due to dilapidated health care facilities and schools.”
Ekwueme further said that the information used to embark on the verification exercise was obtained from PPDC’s open contracting platform Budeshi – www.budeshi.ng – which due to its compliance with the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) links budget and procurement data together while covering all stages of the contracting cycle.
“Open contracting discloses procurement information in a way that enables various stakeholders to engage in public contracting processes. In other words, open contracting provides an avenue for us to open up our procurement system in order to fix it,” PPDC said in a statement.