🔍Where to find procurement data
There is a concerted effort underway to centralise procurement data in South Africa, making it relatively easy to find individual tender documents. The current government regulations require that that organs of state publish procurement plans, requests for information, RFPs and RFQs on its central portal, https://www.etender.gov.za.
This is a comprehensive portal, which means that it contains many thousands of documents relating to open and awarded tenders. It is, however, not quite as comprehensive as it aims to be, and details of awarded tenders rarely include information about winning bids.
Most government departments also advertise opportunities on their own websites and in newspapers. Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga have dedicated tender bulletin sites, while Western Cape and Free State only use the central portal above. KZN, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape have notifications on each departmental homepage (eg. KZN Education).
SOEs also often maintain their own complementary databases for documentation, for example this is Eskom's tender page.
Because these lists can be hard to navigate or use on a regular basis, there are several private companies that specialise in collecting RFPs and RFQs on behalf of clients, to help identify opportunties as they arise in return for a subscription fee.
One of the biggest challenges is that although many tenders are advertised in digital formats, they are shared online in the PDF format. These are not easily machine readable, and we'll cover scraping information from PDFs in a future lesson.
Emergency spending scandals and oversight
Because of the public outcry over the misuse of emergency funds set aside for personal protective equipment (PPE) and the like at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, National Treasury began maintaining a dedicated portal with details of awarded tenders, for citizens to access and provide oversight.
It has recently extended this service to cover emergency procurement relating to relief efforts following flooding in KZN.
OpenUP uses the information provided by Treasury to maintain its own records of PPE spending at Keep The Receipts. We'll look at this in more detail in the next topic.
Procurement information is covered by the Promotion of Access to Information Act (2000), which means that details of tenders and awards that have not been published should be made available on demand.
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