Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich says that since the implementation of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act in 2016, several challenges that include lack of access to credit facilities and delayed payments have hindered implementation of the Act/FILE
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 4 – The National Treasury has revealed that procurement entities have been unable to ensure that 30 per cent of their procurement value every year is allocated to disadvantaged groups, who include women, youths and people with disabilities in compliance with the law.
Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich says that since the implementation of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act in 2016, several challenges that include lack of access to credit facilities and delayed payments have hindered implementation of the Act.
Rotich was addressing the Finance and Planning Parliamentary Committee where he revealed that only county executives reserved the minimum of 30 percent in the last six months for the year ended 2016.
Procuring entities sampled include ministries and State departments, State corporations, County Assemblies and Executives, university and colleges and constitutional, commissions and independent offices.
“County Executives are the only ones who almost reached the threshold as of December last year at 30.2 per cent. Ministries and State departments were the poorest performers at 13.79 percent, followed by state corporations at 17.89 percent,” Rotich said.
Rotich also revealed that a total of 67,690 contracts were awarded to the target groups between January 2016 to December 2017.
The women category received the highest number of contracts at 34,335 followed by youth at 29,170 and people with disabilities at 4,066.
Over the period, the aggregate value of contracts was Sh56.3 billion.
“The implementation of the Act has faced several challenges. For instance, despite the entities reserving procurements for the target groups, there is still low absorption of the amounts reserved for the target group. Poor reporting by procuring entities on the status of implementation of the scheme has also been an issue,” Rotich said.
As of December 2017, a total of 78,698 enterprises owned by disadvantaged groups had been registered, prequalified and issued with AGPO certificates.
According to Rotich, of these, 44,864 are youth owned, 30,326 are women owned and 3,508 are owned by people with disabilities.
