Concept of Open Contracting

The idea of open contracting is emerging as a strategy to increase contract transparency and monitoring, with major expected benefits in terms of quality of governance, better value for money, reduced corruption, increased service delivery, and better development outcomes.

Emerging good practice in this area involves mandated or non-mandated pro-active disclosure of contract information in user-friendly formats, from the awarding process to the monitoring and evaluation of contract implementation, with open access to the public, ideally through online platforms. Open contracting and transparency in public procurement have been proven to save money and broaden competition.

About Nigeria Open Contracting Portal (NOCOPO)

Nigeria Open Contracting Portal (NOCOPO) is about opening up public procurement in Nigeria through increased disclosure of procurement information to all stakeholders with a view to ensuring improved transparency and accountability, improve competition, prevent corruption, enhance active citizen participation towards achieving better service delivery and improved ease of doing business in Nigeria.

NOCOPO won the global Government Innovation Award. “The award is conferred as part of the Open Contracting Innovation Challenge, a competition (with 88 teams from 40 countries). The Innovation Challenge honors original ideas for managing, analyzing, and monitoring how the government buys goods and services, as well as cutting-edge approaches to publishing what gets bought, when, from whom, and for how much”.

Apart from being the first to develop an open contracting portal in Nigeria, the portal was certified Open Data Standard (OCDS) compliant by the Open Contracting Partnership(OCP).  The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), is a free, non-proprietary open data standard for public contracting, implemented by over 30 governments around the world. It is the only international open standard for the publication of information related to the planning, procurement, and implementation of public contracts and has been endorsed by the G20, the G7, and major international organizations