South Asian Regional Public Procurement conference to begin tomorrow

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Economic Reporter :
A three-day 3rd South Asia Regional Public Procurement Conference will be held from tomorrow (Sunday) in Dhaka. The aim of the conference is to make the public procurement systems of the South Asian Countries more effective.
The conference will continue with the same overarching goal to enable the heads of public procurement and other key stakeholders in South Asia to meet and learn from one another with a view to continuously making their public procurement systems more effective in utilisation of public resources, said a high official at the Planning Ministry.
He said the main theme of the conference will be ‘Innovation for Sustainable Performance’. Within the framework of this theme, five topics will be discussed.
These are sound public procurement performance, procurement workforce and professionalism, Electronic-Government Procurement (e-GP), innovative tools and methods for performance enhancement and performance measurement.
The Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) under the Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) of the Planning Ministry will organise the conference on behalf of the government of Bangladesh.
It will be co-sponsored by Bangladesh government, World Bank, ADB, other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and Development Partners (DPs). Besides, representatives from Latin American regional public procurement network, European procurement network, Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply-CIPS will also share their experiences at the conference.
Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal is expected to inaugurate the conference to be held at Hotel Westin on Sunday morning.
Another official at the CPTU told NN that speakers and participants from the eight countries and the representatives of the DPs will make presentations on their experiences in effectively using the innovative tools of public procurement, including e-GP, framework agreements and PPP.
The official said in addition to several presentations on topics of interest, each country will be given 15 minutes for a presentation on its public procurement system and the use of the new and innovative public procurement tools followed by questions and answers.
An action plan – which will be styled as ‘Dhaka Conference Action Plan’ – will be one of the outputs of the conference. This Action Plan will include time-bound implementable key actions to support regional countries in making effective use of innovative public procurement tools. The Action Plan will also include steps for establishing a regular contact with the Saarc Secretariat with a view to including eventually in the Saarc agenda the regional cooperation on public procurement.
The other key output will be the conference report. For this, the Kathmandu Conference report format will be used. Earlier in April 2011 in Kathmandu and in March 2014 in Islamabad, the heads of public procurement, along with other key public procurement policy or decision makers and representatives of oversight bodies, met in two conferences with a view to providing public procurement policy makers from each country with a platform for exchange of knowledge and experiences and for networking.
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