Contacts in the country:
Public Procurement Monitoring Office
In 2015, Nepal was devastated by a powerful earthquake that killed thousands and flattened homes and historic sites across the country. The damage was estimated at the equivalent of US$7 billion. Since then, the Nepali government and the international community have pumped vast sums into relief and reconstruction efforts. Through the National Reconstruction Authority, the government allocated US$1.3 billion for rebuilding activities in the 2016/2017 fiscal year.
Our showcase and learning project in Nepal seeks to understand how open contracting can contribute to improving the delivery of goods and services to citizens. The earthquake relief and reconstruction effort is arguably the country’s most urgent priority in this area.
To help ensure the money is well-spent, we will support Nepal’s Public Procurement Monitoring Office to make open contracting data across a variety of sectors and including earthquake relief and reconstruction projects easily accessible to the public. We will also help them to work with businesses and civil society to use this data to track whether the projects are efficient and effectively meet the needs of the people they’re designed to help.
The government is the largest procuring body in Nepal with annual procurement spending totaling US$650 million, or around 20 percent of the national GDP. In addition, nearly half of Nepal’s budget is allocated to development — the bulk of this money, more than 60 percent, is spent on procurement.
We will assist Nepal’s public institutions, such as the Public Procurement Monitoring Office, to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard in their procurement systems, and to use procurement data analysis for better governance.
We want to involve citizens as much as possible to ensure public spending on procurement results in value for money, fairness and integrity. We hope to make contracting information accessible to the emerging data community — such as the Open Nepal Network, which tracks earthquake relief and reconstruction funds — and help to develop their skills to foster accountability in procurement. The Open Data Day in 2017 was a good example for putting procurement data to use through the Open Contracting Data Standard.
A shared MEL framework will be used to monitor, evaluate and learn from the project.
Detailed Showcase and Learning project document including a project summary, brief background, key activities and timeline, as well as the monitoring, evaluation and learning plan.
