A study on capacity assessment in public procurement of urban local bodies in Bangladesh

Abstract

In the context of the new vision of local government institutions, the government plans to entrust the municipalities and city corporations with enhanced development role in their respective areas of jurisdiction. The government is encouraging and empowering the municipalities and corporations to undertake increasingly more development programmes/projects for catering to the needs of the citizen. As part of that intend, huge development works have been implementing through government allocation, different development partners assistance and ULB’s own resources. In case of development partners assisted project, Local government Engineering Department (LGED) has play vital role to eliminate possibility of “mis-procurement” irrespective of goods, works and services. In contrast, all Municipalities have experience with low value procurement and evaluations from their local budget or from national funds for goods and civil works and have no experience in service procurement. From this study, the weakness of the procurement function of municipalities in the area of i) Organizational and Staff Capacity, ii) Information Management, iii) Procurement Practices, iv) Effectiveness and v) Accountability Measures came to the surface through the interviews of the personnel of engineering section who are responsible for all sorts of procurement. Inadequate human resource, lack of proper training and logistics are the causes identified through this study. Another challenging part of municipality capacity is the “random” transfer of staffs. However, a further rigorous evaluation is needed prior to take any initiatives to enhance the capacity of municipalities.