Asia Regional Workshop on Implementing Procurement Reforms and Improving Procurement Performance

Honorable Adviser, Ministry of Finance and Planning, Dr. A. B. Mirza Azizul Islam; Chairperson; Secretary IMED, Mr. Sk. A.K. Motahar Hossain; ADB Country Director, Ms. Hua Du; Director General CPTU, Mr. A.K. Debnath; Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

           It is a pleasure for me to join the “Asia Regional Workshop on Implementing Procurement Reforms and Improving Procurement Performance”.   I am really honored to attend this high-level event aiming at exchanging experiences on public procurement reforms. Opportunities like these are key ingredients for the needed improvements in public sector management, in governance and on accountability in the public sphere.  On behalf of the World Bank, I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Government of Bangladesh for hosting and excellent organization of such an important event, in association with The World Bank, ADB, DFID, and AusAID. I have been pleased and impressed to know about the presence of representatives from a significant number of countries in Asia and the Pacific with senior Government officials, as well as foreign missions,  development partners, business/ contracting/ consulting/ NGO communities, universities and professional bodies.

Procurement reform is clearly a crucial building block in improving governance, public sector management and accountability.   Poor public procurement practices result inevitably in waste of scarce public funds.  It is now well-documented that poor or inefficient public procurement not only adversely affects economic growth, but more importantly, negatively impact on the investment climate in any country. Luckily, most countries of the Asia and Pacific region, in order to improve the procurement environment, have started to bring substantial changes in this regard by trying to put in place an efficient, transparent, and accountable system of public procurement of their own.

Regarding our host country Bangladesh, The joint Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) 2006 by the World Bank and other three development partners did put governance at a center stage, and thus governance has been increasingly our core focus in every sector and/or every project we intend to engage in.   The strategy, through bold improvements on the core governance aspects of public management, aims at enhancing transparency and accountability, and at reducing opportunities for the misuse of   public funds. 

           We are delighted to note that Bangladesh, with the technical assistance of the World Bank, has played a leading role in undertaking a systemic change in its procurement environment.  The country has a nodal procurement agency and a solid procurement law, with rules containing most of the internationally-recognized good procurement practices. In addition, it made substantial progress in procurement management capacity and procurement performance tracking by developing a core group of national trainers, providing three-weeks training to over 1800 staffs, and piloting a fully-computerized performance tracking system, using a set of indicators similar to those recommended by the OECD-DAC harmonization round table.  In short, Bangladesh is ahead of the curve and has made important contributions to the harmonization agenda, demonstrated by its recognition in several international forums, including the Paris Conference in 2005. 

            The potential gains from such policy and institutional reforms are enormous but the path to fully implementing the reform is not an easy one.   In the Bangladesh case, there remain several cross-cutting institutional and governance constraints.  Clearly, much more needs to be done to make it sustainable with contributions from public officials and bidding community.

Experience of other countries show that involvement of civil society and NGOs in procurement monitoring has been important in ensuring that procurement processes are accountable and outcomes are defensible.  Such participatory monitoring would help deter leakages of funds with strengthened voice of civil society.  Another element is the electronic government procurement (e-GP).  Within the Asia and Pacific, there are countries where e-GP has proved a cost and time-saving tool.  I am happy to note that to make the reform effort sustainable, the Government of Bangladesh, with World Bank’s assistance, started a follow-on procurement reform project, largely focusing on the implementation and monitoring challenges at the key sectoral levels including a set of focused components on social accountability through involvement of civil society and introducing electronic procurement.

These are all significant challenges. In a rapidly changing global economic environment, the sharing of experiences is critical path for success.   This three-day workshop with eight working sessions will thus be a unique opportunity for the participating countries and development partners to share their respective experiences covering policy and institutional changes, monitoring mechanisms, capacity development and procurement harmonization actions. With your active participation, this workshop could take steps to developing a sound implementation action plan based on the best practices, tailored to each country’s specific needs.

In order to achieve a sustainable development in the client countries, there would be a need to enhance the ability to rely on the country systems, thus to quickly reach a robustness level of their own systems which is mutually acceptable. Therefore, I urge our development community to reinforce support to our respective counterpart governments in any appropriate way possible. This event will be an important milestone in that direction and we remain committed to support you during this journey.     We are delighted to support this workshop, and I wish it all success.

Thank you.