Private-Public Partnerships

Ghana/Swiss Partnership for Transparency and Accountability in Public Procurement
 

1. Background

Ghana has, at its highest political level, 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 has 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 has 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.

The proposed project would accompany and reinforce the implementation of the new law.

2. Overall Goal and Content

The purpose of the Ghana/Swiss project is to track the change in procurement processes in Ghana and help it achieve more transparent and accountable procurement decisions

3. Objectives

The project has 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.

4. Activities

The Centre’s team delivers a nationwide procurement awareness training programme in collaboration with ITC to ensure comprehension of the new Law.

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

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

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

Contacts

Office of the President, Ghana Professor Kwaku Appiah-Adu, Director of Policy Coordination Monitoring & Evaluation Office of the President, The Castle, Osu P.O. Box 1627 Accra, Ghana k.appiah_adu@castle.gov.gh			Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) Trade and clean technology cooperation Effingerstrasse 1, 3003 Berne - Switzerland     www.seco.admin.ch
IDEAS Centre, Geneva Mr. Nicolas Imboden, Project director Mr. Sjoerd Visser, Project coordinator 10, rue de l’Arquebuse, 1204 Geneva - Switzerland Phone: +41 22 807 17 40 Fax : +41 22 807 17 41 Email: :sjoerd.visser@ideascentre.ch			International project expert Ms. Nadia Balgobin Business & Public Ethics Consultant Geneva - Switzerland       Email: nadia.balgobin@bluewin.ch