GACC Schooled Journalists, CSOs on Procurement Breaches

The Ghana Anti Corruption Coalition (GACC) has on wednesday schooled some journalists and members of civil society organisations on procurement processes and breaches in Accra.

Procurement breaches in both public and private sectors have been fraught with challenges ranging from leakages and lack of transparency.

The challenges in the transparency of the procurement processes over the years has resulted in state institutions lossing huge amount of money.

Communication Officer for the GACC, Madam Faustina Djabatey explaining the objective of the workshop, under the theme :” Open Contracting and E-Procurement”, said the capacity building is expected to assuage the leakages and the lack of transparency in the procurement system.

She stated further that the media and CSOs play a major role in advocacy and information dissemination hence the need for the workshop.

“Advocacy is more effective when we build partnership or when we collaborate, that is why we brought together civil society Practitioners and Journalist here to have understanding of the process when it comes to procurement so that they could also support us use their platform to also advocate on some of these issues”, she added.

Furthermore, “ so once they understand this is the Procurement cycle, this is what information is needed at every stage of it, it helps them to really advocate on our behalf”.

The GACC Communications Officer reiterated that lack of the aforementioned lapses in Procurement process affects service delivery hence the need for “Civil Society and Journalists to use their platforms to advocate along this line”.

Senior IT Officer at the Public Procurement Authority(PPA), Mr. Gideon Sandinah delivering a Presentation on the Ghana Electronic Procurement System( GHANEPS), revealed that E-procurement which started in 2012 has come to address some of the challenges associated with procurement.

He said the system, being implemented by the PPA comes with benefits including increasing cost effectiveness and accountability as well as improve the integrity of procurement transparency.

He explained further that GHANEPS is a migration from the manual mode of tendering and bidding for contracts to an electronic medium to eliminate the lapses in the procurement system.

“To the contractors, suppliers and consultants, with the new GHANEPS, I’ll entreat them to take advantage of our ongoing training programmes because we are going to move virtually from manual to electronic so if you don’t take advantage of our training programme and benefit from it, then it is likely that you’ll not be able to participate in future procurement tender processes because you’ll not be able to either tender, bid and participate in the whole process because everything is going to be online,” Head of Public Affairs of PPA, David Damoah emphasized.