News

on: 21 Feb 2018

xindex

"Benchmarking tool for public procurement" launched

In the presence of representatives of Civil Society Organizations and public institutions, the project “Benchmarking tool (xindex) for public procurement activities” has been officially launched. The objective of the project supported by USAID’s program “Transparent, Effective and Accountable Municipalities (TEAM)”, is to monitor and assess the performance of Kosovo’s 38 municipalities in public procurement activities, on local level.

19 representatives of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and other public institutions, attended the first activity of the project, which was a training on the best practices of public procurement, and introduction with the ‘xindex’ statistical model, developed for this project. Initially, the CSOs throughout a 6 month period (January-June) will collect data of municipalities’ activities on public procurement, and will enter them in the statistical model ‘xindex’.

The project was declared open by Alban Hashani, Executive Director of Riinvest Institute. Mr. Hashani declared that this project will enable us as civil society organizations to possess a rigorous methodology in collecting and interpreting the existing data of the municipalities in public procurement, and as such avoid subjective interpretations. In this way, according to Mr. Hashani, as civil society organizations we will find it much easier to advocate at municipalities and other institutions regarding issues that have to do with procurement. According to him, apart from many positive aspects, this methodology is very sustainable, since it allows us to use it also in the future, collecting data and allowing us to analyze the trend of the municipalities’ activity in public procurement. Meanwhile, a very important point of this index according to Mr. Hashani, is the fact that this methodology also allows us to compare the performance between municipalities, and thus foster competitiveness between them.

Meanwhile, Stephen Carpenter, Chief of Party of USAID Transparent, Effective and Accountable Municipalities (TEAM) declared that the 5 year project “TEAM”, is a project that aims to fight corruption, and is designed to support the improvement of public procurement system, first on the local level. Part of this project, Mr. Carpenter declared that they are also providing support institutions of central government such as Public Procurement Regulatory Commission and Procurement Review Body, as well as Civil Society Organizations and media’s. Meanwhile, regarding the project “Benchmarking tool (xindex) for public procurement activities”, Mr. Carpenter stated that having in mind the general perception that in public procurement corruption is quite spread, and it’s difficult to find evidence, this index is a unique tool, since it allows us to measure municipalities’ performance through data based evidence and analyses.

In the first part of the lecture, participants were acquainted with the best practices of public procurement and with the theoretical part of the ‘xindex’ statistical model, and in the second part they had the chance to practice the process of collecting data form e-procurement platform and enter them into the ‘xindex’ statistical model.