PPCC Boss Secures Additional Funding to Modernize Public Procurement in Liberia.

The head of Liberia’s Public Procurement and Concessions Commission (PPCC), Bodger Scott Johnson, has secured additional funding of US$250,000(Two Hundred Fifty Thousand United States Dollars) from the World Bank to support the ongoing public procurement digitization effort in Liberia.

The PPCC boss made the breakthrough while attending the 2024 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Funds (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) in the United States of America. During these engagements, Mr. Johnson met and held high level discussions with senior World Bank officials, including the Regional Country Manager for Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia. This Year’s Spring Meetings were held from April 17 to 19, 2024.

The additional funding is intended to augment the initial budget of US$2.9 Million approved by the World Bank through the Governance Reform and Accountability Transformation (GREAT) Project, to support the  roll-out of the Electronic Government Procurement(e-GP) system and increase transparency and accountability in the government procurement system through the implementation of e-GP system, with a focus on strengthening procurement capacity at the county level.

The roll-out will include interfaces with the business registration system to verify supplier status, an SMS notifications gateway for confirmations, e-tax payments, a gateway system to verify the attestation related to tax status, and to the Integrated Financial Management Information System(IFMIS) based in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning(MFDP).

The project will also finance the  roll out of the e-Procurement system to a select number of government institutions, including County Service Centers, and also finance the development of a sustainable procurement policy and implementation road-map, procurement regulations, manuals, and standard procurement documents.

As part of the arrangement, the project will also finance capacity building and change management for compliance implementation monitoring and green procurement, as well as support the supply of Information Technology equipment and  peripherals, website updates, workshops and seminars for stakeholders.

In November 2023 the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission(PPCC), signed a contract with a software developer, European Dynamics for the supply, installation, configuration, deployment and maintenance of  Electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) System on Software as a Service (SAAS) Model. The contract represents Phase One of the project valued at at Five Hundred Sixty-Three Thousand and  Five Hundred United States Dollars (US$ US$563,500.00). This phase constitutes the development, installation, configuration and deployment of the system to six selected institutions of the Liberia Government. This phase of the project is also funded by the World Bank through the Public Financial Management Reforms for Institutional Strengthening Project (PFMRSP) based in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP). The PFMRSP project is expected to end in October 2024 but will be succeeded by the GREAT project.