Bids, bias, and barriers: building fairer, more open procurement for all
This week at the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC COSP), the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Corruption, edited by Sope Williams and Maria Krambia Kapardis, Lisa A. Kihl, will be launched — an important step forward in connecting two critical conversations: integrity and inclusion.
In our contribution to the volume, “Bids, Bias, and Barriers,” co-authored with Carey Kluttz and Mariana López Fernández, we explore how data — or rather the lack of it — shapes our ability to measure and improve both corruption risks and gender participation in public procurement.
Public procurement is where money, power, and discretion meet. Governments spend more than US$13 trillion each year through procurement, one out of every three dollars spent, making it both the single biggest corruption risk and one of the greatest levers for achieving gender equality and inclusive growth.
Yet, despite this potential, the data we need to act remains limited and fragmented. Globally, less than half of countries publish procurement data that is machine-readable. Fewer still publish any gender-disaggregated information on who benefits from public contracts. Without that, we can’t track whether reforms are working, identify red flags for corruption, or see whether women-owned and women-led businesses are getting a fair shot at government opportunities.
At the Open Contracting Partnership, we’ve been working with governments and civil society to change that picture — building tools and standards to make procurement data open, usable, and actionable. Our Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) helps governments publish procurement data consistently across the full contracting cycle, from planning to implementation. With structured, comparable data, we can identify potential corruption risks, such as single-bid contracts or contract modifications, and we can analyze who participates and who wins.
Our Red Flags Guide brings these approaches together, offering practical methodologies and indicators to detect and monitor corruption risks in procurement systems. Combined with gender-disaggregated data, these tools can help governments and watchdogs alike understand how integrity and inclusion intersect, and where reforms are needed most.
The chapter shares practical examples from the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Uganda, and Senegal that show what’s possible when governments and reformers use open data to drive integrity and inclusion.
- In the Dominican Republic, open data and proactive reforms helped increase the number of suppliers by more than 130% and boosted the share of public contracts won by women-led businesses to nearly 30%.
- In Colombia, cities like Palmira are using open data to support rural and women producers to access local markets through public contracts.
- In Uganda, early efforts are defining what counts as a women-led business, digitizing procurement data, and piloting gender-responsive procurement approaches that can be scaled nationally.
These efforts demonstrate that when procurement is open and data-driven, it becomes a tool not only for more efficient government but for fairer economies. Transparency and gender equality reinforce each other: data that helps detect corruption can also reveal bias and exclusion.
But the lesson across all cases is clear: openness is not enough on its own. Governments need clear definitions, strong systems for collecting and publishing disaggregated data, and capacity building for both procurement officials and women entrepreneurs. Civil society and oversight bodies need to use that information to hold systems accountable and advocate for change. As the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Corruption launches at UNCAC COSP, we invite policymakers, researchers, and advocates to join us in a shared agenda: to make procurement data work for integrity and inclusion. Let’s ensure that every dollar governments spend is spent fairly, openly, and with equal opportunity for all.
