The fourth South Asia Regional Public Procurement Conference starts in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo today.
The four-day conference under the auspices of South Asia Public Procurement Network (SAPPN) is hosted by the Sri Lankan Department of Public Finance, the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) under the planning ministry said in a statement.
The theme of this conference is “e-GP in South Asia: Achievements, Opportunities and Challenges”. The e-GP stands for electronic government procurement which is an ICT based public procurement system.
The CPTU of the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division had hosted the third regional conference in November 2015 in Dhaka.
Director General of CPTU Md Faruque Hossain, the current chair of SAPPN, is representing Bangladesh in the conference.
He will make a country presentation highlighting e-GP progress in Bangladesh and another presentation on e-GP interoperability.
Md Mosharraf Hussain, system analyst of CPTU, will make a presentation on e-GP business model in the conference.
The SAPPN for the first time is going to make public procurement award under some categories. BRAC Institute of Governance and Development has been selected for an award for its case story on citizen engagement in public procurement.
The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Islamic Development Bank are the sponsors of the conference.
The SAPPN is a platform of heads of public procurement regulatory bodies in South Asian countries.
The participants of the conference exchange ideas and experiences to innovate good practices to improve public procurement management.