Equipping civil society to monitor public procurement in Ukraine

The EBRD is working to give civil society the tools it needs to effectively monitor Ukraine’s new electronic public procurement system, ProZorro. In cooperation with NGOs Transparency International Ukraine and the Partnership for Transparency Fund and the Kiev School of Economics, the Bank is developing monitoring tools and providing training for CSOs so that they can use them to monitor local and municipal procurement as effectively as possible. The TC project is funded by the Czech Republic and the EBRD-Ukraine Stabilisation and Sustainable Growth Multi-Donor Account.

Civil society activists initiated and led the development of ProZorro, which became mandatory for all purchases by public bodies in Ukraine in 2016 and aims to vastly improve the transparency and cost-effectiveness of the country’s procurement processes. The EBRD played a key role in designing the electronic procurement model that ProZorro uses. Now that the system is in place, robust independent monitoring is important for its credibility and for building confidence in the wider investment climate.