Ghana to strengthen public procurement system

GHANA has become the third African country to introduce a sustainable public procurement (SSP) project designed to improve the public procurement system.
The project, which is meant to shift focus from the economic aspect of the procurement process to its social and environmental impact for the selection of suppliers, was established under an agreement between the government of Ghana and the Swiss government, during which the latter provided a US$2.7 million grant to support the Public Procurement Authority (PPA).
To give impetus to its successful implementation, which forms part of the Swiss-Ghana project on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and funded by the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), a 12-member Ghana task force (GTF) has been inaugurated in Accra to bring the SSP on stream in the earliest possible time to contribute to the development of sector performance indicators of the project.
The GTF is composed, among others, of key stakeholders from civil society organisations, trade unions and the institutions of engineers, architects and commerce, with the mandate to lead the process of introducing SSP at all levels of the various ministries, departments and agencies of State.
The Chief Executive of the PPA, Mr Samuel Sallas-Mensah, at the official inauguration of the GTF, said the PPA in 2008 applied to SECO for development assistance to pursue a programme to improve the performance of the public procurement system with respect to its principles of transparency, accountability and sustainability in public procurement.
The project, he said, was to be executed through deliberate actions to promote the production and consumption of sustainable goods and services by also strengthening the PPA’s procurement performance assessment system, noting that the SSP was about environmental protection, social safeguards and sustained growth.
The Counsellor at the Swiss Embassy, Mr Martin Saladin, said Switzerland’s assistance to Ghana concentrated on sound macro-economic policies and transparent public finances, financial sector development, infrastructure and regulatory development and particularly in the area of energy.
In his keynote address, a Deputy Finance and Economic Planning Minister, Mr Fiifi Kwetey, who pledged the government’s support for the SSP, explained that several countries that used procurement to tackle long-term unemployment viewed the project as part of their policies for advancing sustainable development.