WB gives another $40m to greatly help expand e-procurement coverage
The World Lender yesterday approved $40 million to help Bangladesh raise the coverage of electronic government procurement (e-GP) with new features to respond to the Covid-19 challenges.
This is additional financing to the Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Consumer Procurement Project (DIMAPPP), that your multilateral lender approved in 2017 to boost public procurement performance.
The World Bank committed to provide $55 million for the project, which aims to restructure the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) and institutionalize e-GP together with enhancing digitisation of public procurement.
The latest financing can help add important features to the e-GP system, including international bidding, direct contracting, framework agreement, electronic contract management and payment, procurement info analytics, geo-tagging and enable, the World Lender said.
"Bangladesh has built systematic changes to increase the open public procurement environment, including digitising the machine. During the general getaway for the Covid-19 pandemic, e-GP enjoyed a crucial role in continuing development works through the entire country." said World Lender Region Director for Bangladesh and Bhutan Mercy Tembon.
"This financing can help ensure 100 per cent make use of e-GP and update the system to enable the united states to keep ensuring timely and top quality public works and public provider delivery," Tembon added.
The financing can help strengthen the emergency procurement procedures and create a roadmap for sustainable procurement.
It will also create a provision to support the tiny and medium-sized and women-led enterprises and scaling-up citizen engagement in public procurement.
The multilateral lender said it's been supporting the government to improve public procurement since 2002.
With the World Bank's help, the federal government rolled out e-GP in four procuring entities.
In FY 2019-20, $17.5 billion worth of procurement contracts, representing about 62 per cent of public procurement expenditure in the country, were prepared through the e-GP system.
During the pandemic, e-GP enabled over 1,300 open public organisations to process all procurement activities online pursuing national competitive procurement methods.
The additional financing will help improve the capacity of the e-GP info center and improve cyber-security. It'll guarantee countrywide rollout of the electronic digital contract management and repayment module with the provision of uploading geo-tagged images, the World Lender said.
"The digitization of general public procurement was a game-changer for both public and private sector. It helped to improve productivity and transparency and built conducting business easier," said World Bank Group Leader for the task Ishtiak Siddique.
To complete the ongoing and latest activities, the job has been extended by one . 5 years till December 31, 2023. With this extra financing, the Globe Bank's assist to the project nowadays stands at $95 million.
