Country Profile: South Africa

South Africa is seeing an increased interest in public procurement owing to corruption and the role it plays in economic development. The question is: where can the most impact be made?

As we can see from this graph, over the last three years, contracting has been increasing steadily with a dip in 2019. Buying tends to increase as the year goes on before quietening down for December. From our analysis of individual departments, we see that tender publication across the board decreased. This decrease is across the board: no one single buyer or set of buyers stood out. So who are the top buyers? We looked at the top buyers over the past 3 years.

Of the top 11 buyers, Transnet and Eskom come by far above the rest. Knowing that Transnet handles transport infrastructure in South Africa, we decided to drill down into their tenders to see where the key areas are.

These top 6 areas cover almost all of Transnet’s tenders (98%). Above and beyond anywhere else, Transnet rail occupies the highest proportion of open tenders. It is the largest publisher of open tenders not only of Transnet but also the open tenders coming from South Africa. You can find Transnet rail and other South African tenders on https://openopps.com/.