Meaningful public procurement data
Quality data and analytics is of crucial importance in public procurement. It allows civil society to hold governments accountable, and allows individuals within government to ensure that the procurement is conducted in a fair, timely and cost efficient way.
Together with the World Bank Governance Global Practice and the Mexican government, we developed a set of dashboards that explores over 500 000 federal procurement procedures. Mexico has shown great commitment to open contracting by opening up their data, but also by driving the development of these kind of tools.
The dashboard providing a summary of the Compranet dataset
Mexico is not alone in their efforts to improve public procurement. Governments around the world are working to make their processes more transparent, efficient and inclusive. That’s why the dashboards ingest data in the Open Contracting Data Standard. Agencies reporting data in this format are able to fork the tool and adapt it so it addresses policy issues that are important to them. Whether that’s the inclusion of SMEs in the procurement process, battling corruption, or ensuring fair prices.
The current dashboards are a pilot, capable of driving discussions around which tools governments need to understand and improve their procurement performance. The code powering the dashboards and the data processing scripts are all available on Github under an open source license. Feel free to fork them and use them for your own use case.