Mr. Pradeep Ranjan Chakraborty, Secretary, Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED), Ministry of Planning, has said that citizens can consider public procurement as their own responsibility. The sense of such belonging can help ensure the quality of public procurement. He said there is no alternative to civic awareness in ensuring transparency and accountability in public procurement.

He was speaking as the chief guest at a workshop on citizen engagement in public procurement at Rajendrapur BRAC CDM in Gazipur on November 29, 2020. The Dhaka Divisional workshop was organized by the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU). The event was managed by BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), a consulting firm of CPTU on engaging citizens in public procurement.

The objectives of the workshop was to exchange experiences gathered from the field level on citizen engagement in public procurement and to share those with  the concerned stakeholders. Director General of CPTU Mr. Mohammed Shoheler Rahman Chowdhury presided over the workshop while Deputy Commissioner of Gazipur Mr. S. M. Tarikul Islam was present as special guest on the occasion.

After the welcome address by Syeda Selina Aziz, Program Manager, BIGD, the team leader of BIGD, Dr. Mirza Hasan made a presentation on the perspective of the citizen engagement in public procurement and the workshop.

Emphasizing citizen engagement in different government works, Director General of CPTU Mr. Shoheler Rahman said the more citizen engagement in public procurement the more will be transparency and accountability in public procurement. In places where citizens, under the DIMAPP project, are involved in monitoring contracts, the quality of implementation is better than earlier.

The “question and answer session” of the workshop touched upon advantages and disadvantages of the existing public procurement process, citizen engagement strategies, responsibilities of citizens, procuring officials and tenderers etc. Officials from public procurement entities, tenderers, civil society representatives, local government representatives and citizen monitors participated in the workshop.

Under the Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project (DIMAPPP), CPTU has been working on the citizen engagement in public procurement in 48 Upazillas of eight divisions in the country.

The BIGD of BRAC University has been assisting CPTU in this regard as a consulting firm. It has been assisting CPTU in formulating an implementable strategy to determine ways to establish citizen engagement in public procurement and monitoring of the implementation of public procurement contracts through local citizens at the field level. BRAC's Community Empowerment Program (CEP) is assisting BIGD at the field level.

The BIGD is simultaneously implementing two different strategies on citizen engagement at the field level. In selected Upazillas, local citizens' groups are formed for monitoring the implementation of specific procurement contracts.

Their responsibility is to monitor the progress of the work and to report any problem to the responsible local PE officer. This group is known as Citizen Observers. On the other hand, in other few Upazillas, no citizen group is formed.  After orientation meetings on the relevant procurement contracts, such local citizens can monitor and report on their own.