Context
About a third of government budget and 70% of the developmental budget in Bangladesh is spent on public procurement. So, efficient, effective, and economical public procurement is instrumental in building a just and prosperous Bangladesh.
Considering the importance of this issue, the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has initiated public procurement reform about two decades ago with support from the World Bank. The first set of reforms came through phase I and II of the Public Procurement Reform Project (PPRP), which aimed to streamline public procurement rules and regulations. The Central Technical Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) was established under the Implementation Monitoring & Evaluation Division (IMED) of the Ministry of Planning (MoP) in 2002 to carry out and oversee the reforms. Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project (DIMAPPP) is the latest government project, which aims to improve public procurement performance and enhance capacity for implementation monitoring of development program/projects.
BIGD has been working with CPTU, the agency in charge of managing the projects, since 2009 to develop and test a model of participatory governance—in the form of citizen monitoring in public work projects for improving public procurement performance. The participatory governance model had been conceptualised and piloted through the PPRP phases, and BIGD is now scaling-up and evaluating the model in the Citizen Engagement Sub-Component (Component 3) of DIMAPPP across 48 Upazilas in Bangladesh.