Marking 10 years and $120 billion of better public procurement for people
10 years ago, we launched the Open Contracting Partnership from a single desk in snowy Washington DC with the grand ambition to transform public procurement, the world’s largest marketplace. We saw a unique opportunity to make government work better, converting taxpayer money fairly and effectively into schools, roads, hospitals and vital services that we all need.
Explore 10 years of open contracting
With so much public money at stake, we expected to find data teams in government who already knew exactly who was buying what from whom for how much. This was not the case, so we developed an Open Contracting Data Standard to bring together crucial documents and data across the whole cycle of procurement and across the many different silos of government.
We were never just after a bit more transparency though, we wanted to transform how procurement is done. Rather than taking bureaucratic, paper-based procurement processes online, we wanted to reimagine the workflows and the data from procurement as a digital public service that serves citizens, not the bureaucrats, unlocking economic opportunity and inclusion and building public trust. We launched our Lift impact accelerator to work with high-performing teams inside and outside of government on compelling reforms to that end. With our support, teams could measure results and quickly test and scale what worked. This was all new in a field dominated by technocratic and overly legal reform processes.
Over the last 10 years, we estimate that we have improved over US$120 billion in government spending and positively impacted more than 200 million people from over 20 compelling examples around the world.
We’ve done that on a relatively modest budget, meaning that every $1 invested in the Open Contracting Partnership has positively impacted five people’s lives.
Here are three key things that we’ve learned:
1) Procurement is powerful
Our world runs on public contracts. Given the scale and scope of public procurement – some $13 trillion annually, or one in every three dollars spent by government – there is tremendous systemic leverage in making procurement work better and do more with less in fiscally constrained times. Indeed, an investment in digital procurement reforms is one of the best investments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
We saw that early on in our life as OCP, where we supported a cross-sector group of reformers in Ukraine to create a radically transparent, open source e-procurement system called Prozorro. For a total cost of about US$5 million, it is estimated that Ukraine saved US$1 billion a year while increasing competition, public trust and economic inclusion. That’s a return on investment of 200:1! Open contracting innovations in Ukraine have since been used to drive down the cost of vital medicines, get better value from the sale of state assets, and improve defense spending.
The global open contracting community continues to think big about what procurement can do: decreasing medicines prices in Brazil, using open data to protect vulnerable communities from the worst effects of flooding in disaster-prone Assam, India, or delivering twice the bike share system for the same price in Mexico City.
2) Partnerships sustain change
Procurement is too vast and complex to transform alone. Partnership has been at the heart of our approach from day one—hence the ‘P’ in OCP.
Bold reformers, cross-sector coalitions, and engagement inside and outside of government have been key to overcoming political and systemic challenges. Vested interests and bureaucratic inertia run deep in procurement, making meaningful reform impossible without coalitions of change that work across silos, shift incentives, and defend progress.
We really saw the power of this during the pandemic. In Ecuador, the collaboration between government and civil society organizations enabled a rapid response by publishing information on emergency contracts publicly as timely open data, expanding oversight of procurement, and increasing the capacity of civil society and public officials.
Supporting and celebrating our amazing community of changemakers – and learning from them to sharpen our approach – has been one of our most powerful strategies. It inspires others to believe that radical change is possible and it strengthens the civic space needed to make it happen.
3) People. Procurement is all about people.
It’s about the people whom public contracts are meant to serve. Better procurement offers opportunity and hope to people, their businesses and their communities. To close, we wanted to share some of the human stories on how better procurement changes lives we’ve encountered in our projects.
We want you to meet:
- Laura and Grecia, residents of Villa 20, an informal settlement in Buenos Aires, share how improved procurement practices have transformed their disadvantaged neighborhood through new housing, infrastructure, and community-driven accountability.
- Cathyline and how open contracting helped her community in Buhanda, Uganda, hold a politically connected contractor accountable, ensuring a much-needed maternity ward was built, bringing vital healthcare closer to her home.
- The children, teachers and parents of the Radist Kindergarten in Irpin, Ukraine, who have had their school rebuilt after being destroyed by Russia. Ukraine’s new DREAM digital reconstruction ecosystem built with OCP support helped channel donor assistance to deliver a safe, modern and inclusive space where Ukraine’s children can learn, play & dream of a brighter future.
In our early days, we wondered if our mission had a shelf life. The answer from our community was clear: the world needs a bold organization to rethink procurement as a vital government function, drive global change, and accelerate local reforms with cutting-edge tools and lessons.
In challenging times, we’re doubling down with a bold goal: improving procurement for one billion people by 2030. None of this would be possible, of course, without our incredible donors – a special thanks to early believers like the Hewlett Foundation, Luminate, Arnold Ventures, and the BHP Foundation.
We have fallen in love with the challenge of better procurement and the US$13 trillion opportunity that it brings. So here’s to many more years of opening doors, bids, and opportunities in public procurement and contracts!
#TheFutureIsOpen
