$17 Billion better spent, 19 million people served: What OCP delivered in 2025, and what we plan for 2026

A decade of OCP! We turned ten years old last year, but there was little time to sit back and celebrate: unprecedented shifts in the global policy and funding landscape hit us and many of our partners hard, demanding tough decisions and rapid adaptation. 

Yet public procurement isn’t going away: no matter the exact shape of government – centralized or decentralized or its level of funding – it still has to buy goods and services to function smartly and effectively. From building infrastructure to delivering healthcare and education, public procurement sits at the heart of how states turn policies into practical outcomes for people. 

Like others, we had to make difficult decisions to best deliver our mission in 2025. We took a hit on our original ambitions for the year, but we were able to achieve major wins and provide value to our community.  

Don’t take our word for it, though. Below, you can read how our community thinks we did last year in our largest-ever community survey, and what they’d like us to prioritize in 2026. 

You spoke. We listened. And together, we delivered. 

We are diligent about tracking and reporting on our impact. Here’s what we hoped to achieve around some key targets in 2025, versus how we did. 

Given that many of our partners and projects relied on USAID funding, which was cut early in the year, we feel that achieving 7 out of our target 10 progress and impact stories was a strong result. These include progress in Chile, Assam, India, Philippines, Lithuania, Brazil, UK and Portland, Oregon, USA. 

We estimate that our interventions resulted in around $17 billion of better procurement spending this year, positively impacting 19 million people. You can see our full targets and how we calculate them here. 

We are also pleased to have exceeded all our data targets this year, and are excited about our 52 OCDS publishers in total. New publishers this year include the national governments of Brazil and Tanzania, and the city of Portland, Oregon, which is the first government in the United States to publish OCDS.

The significant miss on our target for projects, programs, and organizations that get non-OCP funding for open contracting work reflects the challenging funding landscape. It is something that we care about deeply as it is important for us to achieve global scale so we will be providing even more support to partners in 26 to get this back on track.  

The 2025 Open Government Partnership (OGP) Summit reminded us that the open contracting ecosystem remains resilient: our partners from the Philippines and the United Kingdom were recognized as OpenGov Challenge Award winners, and our partners from Brazil, Nuevo León, Mexico, and the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Cali, were honorable mentions. The energy and enthusiasm from our community at events like OGP power us forward!

Another highpoint for us in 2025 was seeing Ukraine’s DREAM Digital Reconstruction Ecosystem become institutionalized as the Public Investment Management system for the whole country. OCP runs the DREAM support office coordinating the project, working very closely with the Ukrainian government and many civic and regional stakeholders. DREAM provides a single pipeline of projects from communities to funders and helps to coordinate all stages of project preparation and delivery, supporting unprecedented transparency and accountability for some 14,000 projects under development in it, totaling UAH2.03 trillion (c. US$48 bn).

Annual survey insights

Each year we ask our community what we are doing well and what we could be doing better. We had our largest ever response in 2025. We’re grateful to our 325+ community members across 63 countries who participated in the survey. Your feedback shapes our work in the years to come. We will do a full write-up later, but here are some headlines: 

• We provided strong programming and partner support in turbulent times. We were glad to see that our programming and partner support remained strong. We are 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 a 91 out of 100, beating our last year’s score! In addition, we asked our partners if they had gained knowledge, skills, or strategies this year from OCP that helped them affect change in public procurement, and we received an average score of 8.2 (8.7 for those that had a high level of interaction with OCP).  

• Our resources continue to provide value. When asked, “How useful have you found OCP’s resources overall?” We received an average score of 8 (8.4 for partners we engaged with more closely).  In terms of specific resources that you found most useful, you highlighted our OCDS documentation guidance (particularly in Africa), our website, our data registry, and our progress and impact stories.

• AI remains top of mind. In terms of specific issue areas you wanted to learn more about, AI remained the number one request in most regions, alongside our core issue areas of anti-corruption (the top issue in Asia), e-procurement, and green/sustainable/social impact (a top priority of our global partners). AI was the number one request last year, too, which is why we created our newly-released Buying AI: Tips and Tools for Public Procurement, our highest scored resource in the US!

• Skill building on data, fundraising and policy change are priorities. Looking ahead, our community is most interested in building skills and knowledge around using and analyzing data (in Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Europe and Latin America), identifying funding opportunities in Africa and making the case for open contracting, especially in the US and Canada. These skills are our bread-and-butter, so we are happy to help. Please reach out. 

Our plans for 2026

Given such a challenging year, your positive feedback and support is hugely energizing! Here is what we are planning for 2026 based on your feedback. 

1. Putting positive impacts on people first. We love the opportunities presented by AI and digitization (see priority 2) but supporting our country partners with transformational change and delivering positive impact for people comes first. The good news is that we see a rich pipeline of groundbreaking procurement reforms across the world. 

We are excited to see those procurement Open Government Challenge award winners deliver for their citizens, and for the eGP transformation projects that we are supporting in countries like Tanzania and Rwanda also deliver, especially for small businesses and local livelihoods. We are also kicking off two new major projects, one in Europe to transform green procurement in Poland, and one in the United States to help the State of Colorado with a groundbreaking modular procurement of their social safety net benefits system. As always, we will document impact and challenges along the way to support global learning. So power to the people in 2026!

2. Expand our offer around AI. For the second year in a row, our partners have overwhelmingly told us that they want us to prioritize more support and learning around AI. Last year we felt we laid a strong foundation with our new buying AI guide, and our team provided assistance around both buying and using AI generally and using AI in procurement, so we feel that we are well positioned to do more around this. For example, we are currently testing a custom LLM-powered chatbot to support users in infrastructure project organization and preparation in Ukraine’s DREAM alongside other UX refinements and training offers. We are also excited for our Medicamentos Transparencia project with Transparencia Brazil to use AI to infer unit prices for medicines from procurement data.  

3. Change global norms and scale reforms. We are excited for new partnerships that help us scale open contracting around the globe. We are grateful to the government of Norway and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that our global partnership to boost integrity in public procurement will continue and grow in 2026. Our collaboration with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is coming to fruition, and we’re happy to see UNOPS become the first international financial institution to publish and use OCDS data to access, analyze and track their own procurement opportunities. Looking ahead, we’re pleased to assist the OECD’s coming revision of its Recommendation on Public Procurement to support more data-driven monitoring and tracking of procurement outcomes. 

What is your vision for better public procurement for people and planet in 2026? Get in touch with us and let us know how we can help!