South Africa, Kenya lead the way on African transparency.

Both South Africa and Kenya lead the way in procurement transparency according to our data, South Africa and Kenya publish more tender notices than the rest of the continent combined and Kenya is the only country with that systematically publishes contract award notices. Both countries have implemented transparency initiatives and both are committed to using transparency to tackle corruption. Although Nigeria does publish data it is spread across multiple sites of varying quality, making it hard to analyse and aggregate.

Last September Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, made a firm commitment to increasing transparency:

“There is an intense focus on detecting and prosecuting COVID related corruption and improving transparency in procurement,” Ramaphosa said.

“I have often said that we must look out for some silver linings beneath this COVID-19 cloud, one of those would be from now on when it comes to procurement we need to have transparency. The type of transparency that will enable our people to know what the money that they pay in taxes is going to be used for.”

The data team at South Africa’s Office for Public Procurement are developing a tool to aggregate data from across the country using the Open Contracting Data Standard. Their work is based on the Global Digital Marketplace Silver Eye tool, which we developed as part of our work for the Government Digital Service.

With both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank increasingly demanding that procurement transparency becomes a condition of access to financial instruments, it seems likely that other African nations will be publishing more and more procurement data.

To find out more about publishing better procurement data, please get in touch.