Nigerian nonprofit investigating procurement and promoting accountability
The Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a Nigerian technology and innovation-based nonprofit is using data to investigate public procurement and government contracting processes with the aim of promoting accountability and transparency.
By Patrick Egwu
Established in 2003, the PPDC is one of Nigeria’s leading citizen-led sector organisations working at the intersection of technology, data, innovation, research, civic and community engagement and public participation in interfacing with governments at all levels across the country.
The PPDC team known as “Procurement Monitors” moves across the country to monitor public procurements and contract processes on health, infrastructure, education and other sectors to ensure accountability and compliance with contracting procedures and laws. With data collected and processed in different formats during the fieldwork, PPDC is able to interrogate and probe government procurement while raising citizen awareness and engagement. In addition, the nonprofit also collaborates with journalists to analyse and produce investigative reports on procurement.
“Going beyond public procurement monitoring and contract implementation which is the end goal, we also do advocacy around these issues,” said Nkem Ilo, PPDC chief executive officer. “We probe and ask questions like how the contract was awarded and the compliance mechanisms. Were there advertisements or competitive mechanisms undertaken when the procurement was being called out? What kinds of procedures did the law put in place? These are the issues we look at and that’s what we would continue doing this year and the coming years.”
For the PPDC, citizen engagement is important in promoting government accountability.
“We want them [citizens] to have a seat at the table,” she says. “A lot of our work in the last three years focuses on building community engagement, having citizens play a bigger role in the procurement and monitoring process and governance issues.”
In Nigeria, procurement compliance remains a core issue and corruption is common during procurement processes. Transparency International Corruption Perception Index ranks Nigeria 149 of the 180 countries sampled in 2020.
To combat corruption across all sectors in the country, the government joined the Open Government Partnership in 2016 and is currently implementing 16 commitments from their 2019–2022 action plan. This action plan features commitments related to fiscal transparency, anti-corruption, extractive transparency, inclusiveness, and public service delivery.
To access data and government records on procurement, and contracts from public institutions, the PPDC relies on the Freedom of information [FOI] Act. Signed into law in 2011, the FOI law provides public access to information held by public authorities or institutions.
Through the law, government agencies and institutions are obliged to publish certain information about their activities while nonprofit organisations are also entitled to request information from public authorities.
The FOI law helps the work of the PPDC, Ilo adds. Last year, the nonprofit was recognised at the National Freedom of Information Awards as the only organisation to have sent the highest number of FOI requests in Nigeria since 2015.
However, despite this law, access to information and public documents from the government are always difficult to access.
This is another challenge, Ilo says, and to minimise the challenges of citizens’ access to procurement data, the nonprofit hosted Budeshi, a platform that serves as a hub for citizens to access procurement data in digital and easy-to-use formats.
The platform is primarily used to demonstrate to public institutions the utility of using uniform data standards to publish and report information across stages in the procurement value chain.
Each year, more than 300 FOI requests are made through Budeshi on procurement across government institutions and the platform currently has more than 10,000 databases.
The PPDC’s work has been impactful — putting the government public institutions on their toes while promoting citizen engagement around public procurement and contract processes. For instance, PPDC facilitated the adoption of the Open Contracting Data Standards [OCDS] and currently leads advocacy for its implementation. Of Nigeria’s 36 states, 10 have signed up to the partnership and others are preparing modalities of joining.
Beyond the complex data and numbers which the PPDC uses to make sense of public procurement, the organisation also uses films to advance their work and engage government institutions and other stakeholders.
Ten years ago, the organisation launched Homevida, a platform that uses young filmmakers and creatives to promote integrity while influencing the public using film.
The idea, according to Ilo, is that procurement information is “complex and complicated, and all of us are visual people. We react more to what we see than what we hear or are told. So, we decided to work on promoting values through the Nigerian movie industry.”
The PPDC doesn’t work alone. The nonprofit collaborates and forges partnerships with other organisations and civil societies in investigating public procurement, holding the government to account and facilitating citizen engagement.
Ilo says funding has been one of the challenges affecting their work especially in the area of monitoring procurement and contract processes across the country. The growing insecurity in the country also means that PPDC field officers are unable to embark on fieldwork monitoring government procurement projects over fears of abduction and violence.
