During the period of 10-19 November, 2020 IDFI participated in the Local Open Contracting Initiative (LOCI) Regional Workshop organized by Hivos in collaboration with the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) and Open Government Partnership (OGP).  The event gathered government officials and civil society organizations from the Republic of Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Ukraine, and others to raise awareness and collective ambition, build on existing local and national OC reforms, and explore opportunities for national-local collaboration.

LOCI is a global linking and learning mechanism for sub-national, local, and city-level Open Contracting (OC) initiatives and reforms. LOCI works with champions and reforms in government, civil society, and the private sector to co-create and implement ambitious local OC initiatives. The overall goal of LOCI is to support actors in OC initiatives striving to make public contracting more efficient, transparent, and accountable so that they may deliver better public goods and services, save money, and create a level play-field with fair competition for the private sector. The Open Government Partnership encourages and provides support to its national and local members in opening up procurement processes through the members' OGP action plans.

IDFI was actively involved in the whole process of the event, starting from its planning stage. During the workshops, IDFI facilitated the discussions held within the sub-group of Georgia and led and organized the discussion session of Monitoring as an Incentive. During the session, IDFI presented the platform of Transparent Public Procurement Rating - https://www.tpp-rating.org/ to the participants and discussed the recent main trends and findings of TPPR. During the discussion attendees also got acquainted with the latest public procurement reforms in Moldova – presented by Iurie Morcotîlo from Expert Grup, and learned how COVID 19 can serve as a chance for transparency reforms in public procurement – presented by Isabelle Adam from Government Transparency Institute.

The workshop established a shared understanding of open contracting and identified action steps for the future development of public procurement systems in the represented countries. The event also supported peer learning between practitioners implementing OC initiatives at national and subnational levels, brokered access and provided advice on strategy, technology, and data from experts in relevant fields and regions. The event succeeded at sparking a more vigorous dialogue between subnational and national governments and civil society.

IDFI would like to express its gratitude towards OCP, HIVOS, OGP and to the brilliant panel speakers.