OCP feedback survey: Closing out 2024 and what’s on the agenda for 2025

[First up, huge compassion and sympathy for everyone impacted by USAID’s current freeze and the “vast carelessness” with which it has been implemented.]

It’s a challenging backdrop to us sharing our annual partners survey but we are here to support you. Your feedback is important to shape how we can work together to navigate the coming months. In these uncertain times both in the US and the world, making government work better is more important than ever. 

2024 was particularly relevant for us as it was the first year under our new strategy. We heard from 232 reformers in 70 countries on how (and if) we are helping, what support is most useful, what we can do better, and the key topics you want support on going forward. Here is what you told us:

1) A strong community

We’re pleased about the continued strength of our global community. We had a great response rate across all Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia and an increasing number of responses from the United States, too. Many of you have been working on procurement for several years, with 77% of respondents working on procurement reforms for three or more years! Most respondents are in government (about 40%), with local civil society second (16%). We had more private sector response than ever before (again from across the globe): now making up over 10% of our sample, which we are delighted about. 

Less good, we have seen a larger gender gap in the responses by our community. Importantly, there was no significant gap in our support indicators across genders, but the overall gap in our response rate widened again after making a dedicated effort to close it during the previous survey. We’ll keep an eye on this over the year.

We are humbled and grateful that we continue to have a very high Net Promoter score from you all. Net Promoter is a common measure of customer satisfaction based on how likely our partners would recommend working with OCP. We received an 88 out of 100, beating our previous record-high score in 2021 during our intensive COVID-19 response and recovery support.

2) A key issue for 2025 is AI

Key issues for you all remain anti-corruption (34%) and digitalization and e-procurement (31%). Green procurement is on the rise too (25% responding this was a priority interest). But a new entrant that has become a top issue for procurement reform: some 49% of you said that Artificial Intelligence is the key issue that you want help on. 

It’s clear that AI has become a cross-cutting issue for many of your organizations, affecting government, technology and our personal lives. 

You ask and OCP gives. We’ve just kick-started work to convene and distill global best practices on procuring AI (or not) this week. We’ll reach out to experts throughout the process and share our insights as we go, continuing the AI series that we kicked off last year. Wider technology procurement also polled strongly as an issue of interest and where support is needed. 

We also note that even though we separated ‘sustainability’ into more specific issue areas, the various topics still polled highly, and we will be continuing to share inspiration and guidance here.

3) Capability, guidance and upskilling

One of our strategy’s key goals is to increase our partners’ capability to drive change in procurement. You told us you gained new knowledge and skills, averaging 7.5 on a scale of 1-10: we owned up to undershooting our targets in previous years, so we are delighted to have made progress here, mostly by focusing on fewer, more impactful interventions as per our new strategy. 

You also rated our resources as “very useful” with an average of 8.3 out of 10, and you asked us for more case studies and opportunities to exchange and collaborate. More on that below.

Digging deeper, while open contracting will have been around for a decade this year, making the case for change remains at the top of the list of skills & resources you need. You’re also appreciating our impact stories and requesting more case studies. We hear you, and we are always pleased to support partners on advocacy. The best thing is to engage us directly so we can shape the arguments and cite the best evidence that will resonate with your stakeholders. As we reflected after digesting these results, there is almost too much evidence and impact now, so we will simplify and synthesize these better over the coming year. 

We have more impact and inspiration stories lined up, such as on how to empower women businesses in Uganda based on our Lift impact accelerator program collaboration between Uganda Procurement Procurement and Disposal of Assets authority and amazing local civil society organization AFIC (the Africa Freedom of Information Centre). You like our thumbnail summaries and key data, so we will keep on with these (it helps make them easier for AI to summarize too).

We have many more publishers of standardized open contracting data over recent years. We see that in the survey results, as you request more guidance on using, analyzing and visualizing all the data that is now available. We will expand our business intelligence and red flags projects and guidance (building out our recently launched new Red Flags guide and our Cardinal open source tool) and add new guidance on using data for green procurement and on anti-corruption reform implementation together with the UNODC.

4) Focus on local needs too 

We noted that different regions have different priorities. Asia polled very strongly on anti-corruption, vendor inclusion was very strong in the USA. Interestingly, e-procurement was very strong in Europe, even more so than green. Green procurement was also very strong in Africa, second only to AI as a priority interest. 

This information will help us better adapt our regional priorities and bring the right peers together in regional events with allies like the Open Government Partnership and the Multilateral Development Banks and at various regional data and project events. 

We will explore how we can ensure our resources are most useful to you and work together to increase capacity across regions – whether this means localizing some of our global tools or more regional peer learning opportunities. 

Next steps

This won’t be an easy year, but we will be here to work together. To mark our 10-year anniversary, we will be celebrating the work of all our amazing partners and friends with a host of beneficiary stories of what procurement transformation means and why it is so important to opportunity, inclusion and better public services.

The slides with the full data are here. Let us know if you have additional comments and insights you would like to share with us.