Open Contracting Partnership

The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) is a collaboration among governments, businesses, civil society, and technologists to open up and transform government contracting worldwide. Bringing open data and open government together, OCP makes sure that fair and effective public contracting will provide everyone everywhere with the public goods, works, and services that they need. In Africa, OCP works with regional partners to better automate and open up procurement systems through improved data management. OCP also helps make procurement more inclusive and accessible to marginalized groups like women and small businesses, and promotes sustainable development in Africa where many governments began digitizing their entire procurement process by implementing electronic procurement systems with the hope of transforming procurement to be more efficient, fair, and accountable. In 2023 OCP will kick off the development of its next five-year strategy. Advancing open contracting in Africa and helping partners to use procurement as a strategic lever for equity and inclusion are some of the key goals that OCP would like to pursue. (Strategy: Inclusive Governance)

The Open Contracting Partnership is a collaboration among government and nongovernment actors aimed at promoting country-level implementation of norms and standards related to disclosure and citizen participation in public procurement and contracting. The partnership’s priorities over the next two years are to support reform champions to use procurement to foster effective and equitable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and, more broadly, to improve public goods, works, and services. The partnership will also invest in data quality improvement and capacity building for civil society partners to monitor and provide feedback to governments and the general public on contract execution. Through the work of the partnership, more than 50 governments have committed to implement open public contracting in the last three years; open contracting has also been endorsed by the G7, G20, and the OECD. Recent estimates show that open contracting reforms have resulted in annual savings of $2-3 billion. By preventing leakage and enabling the effective use of public resources, open contracting is central to the achievement of the goals of all strategies of the Gender Equity and Governance Program. (Strategy: Transparency, Participation, and Accountability)