Civic Monitoring of Public Procurement in Ukraine

Aim

The project aimed to establish an automated monitoring system to track public procurement, including the spending of funds within the healthcare sector. This information would then be accessible to every patient in order to increase transparency of healthcare procurement, with the long-term goal being the improvement of service delivery quality.

Landscape

At the beginning of 2016, the healthcare sector was characterised with high levels of corruption, mismanagement of public funds for the procurement of medicines and medical products, and an overall lack of transparency. Medicine prices in particular were affected with some regions paying 3 times the amount other regions were charged for the same medicine.

Activities

1. TI Ukraine provided the development, administration and legal support and more components for an online procurement monitoring portal called ProZorro. The project also had the active support of other activists, businesses and the government. A pilot version of this portal launched on 12th February 2015
   System developmentTrial & implement new approach
2. Despite the successful launch of the ProZorro system, there was no generalized database of identified procurement violations. Therefore, TI Ukraine developed the DOZORRO system, this was fully integrated in the ProZorro system and enabled anyone to leave structured feedback on procurements.
   Improvement plansSystem development
3. TI Ukraine initially selected 10 civil society regional organisations to improve the accountability of the monitoring of the now readily-available procurement data. This later increased to 25 organisations who identify and submit complaints concerning procurement violations. TI Ukraine took on the responsibility to professionalise the members of this community through comprehensive training.
   Monitoring & evaluation
4. TI Ukraine attended the OGP Global Summit 2019 in Canada where they shared the Ukrainian experience in healthcare public procurement monitoring. This increased the exposure of their work and brought awareness to the benefits of open contracting.
   AdvocacyAwareness raising

Achievements

1. The ProZorro system introduced maximum transparency and access to information to the area of procurement. On the 28th December 2015, TI Ukraine officially handed the ProZorro system over to the government. Consequently, starting from the 1st August 2016, every public procurement had to be passed through the ProZorro system.
2. From 2016 to 2017, over 350 training seminars were organised which were attended by over 20,000 people who were trained on how to increase their capacity to organise, participate in and monitor procurement.
3. As of March 2019, the saved funds amounted to almost USD 2.5 billion.
4. The project has been met with wide acclaim, both domestically and internationally, including from the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Stephan Kubiv, who called DOROZZO one of the most crucial cost-cutting factors in public procurement.

Future Plans

Having built this monitoring infrastructure and united a civic movement, TI Ukraine will focus on strengthening the durability and stability of existing monitoring strategies. They are also aiming to further develop the capacity of regional networks whilst raising funds from businesses. Additionally, there are plans to provide methodological and technical assistance to similar initiatives in other countries.