NAIROBI September 11 -The Public Procurement Oversight Authority (PPOA) says it will soon enter into memoranda of understanding with various anti-graft organisations, to help stamp out corruption in public procurement.
Acting Director General Maurice Juma said Thursday that the authority was collaborating with Kenya Anti Corruption Authority (KACC) in a bid to identify areas of possible cooperation in the war against graft.
Juma said the authority was confident that the move would help reduce corruption incidences, which have been blamed for the inefficiency in public procurement processes.
“The procurement law has outlined what we as PPOA are supposed to do and we will sit down with these other organs and see how well we can tackle various issues that border on corruption,” Juma said.
The director spoke during the launch of the authority’s third wave of the Rapid Results Initiative (RRI), aimed at improving service delivery in six thematic areas within 100 days.
The areas include compliance, Information, Communications and Technology (ICT), policy and research and capacity building, where the authority would strive to increase awareness on the Procurement and Disposal Act, among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the construction sector.
“We intend to achieve this in order to improve service delivery to our clients and also assist suppliers to participate more in the procurement opportunities,” said Juma.
He announced that the authority was targeting to improve compliance with the Public Procurement and Disposal Act, 2005 and regulations, 2006; streamline procurement using modern business processes so as to reduce the cost of procurement by 20 percent.
The authority’s ICT manager Jerome Ochieng told Capital Business that they are running a website aimed at creating awareness among the public on all procurement issues, including advertising of government tenders.
In administration under the RRI, the authority targets to assess the impact of availing info on the administrative board’s services to clients on the website. Here, said Juma, the authority intends to reduce reviews that do not comply with the minimum requirements for filing of reviews from 10 percent to 2 percent with the same period.
There are also plans to set benchmarks on employee satisfaction by carrying out three baseline surveys within the authority in the set period.
The Director also revealed that the authority was looking at increasing the number of procuring entities using the Internal Procurement Performance Monitoring Tool (IPPMT) from 13 to 25 within the same period besides increasing awareness of small and medium Enterprises on the procurement act and regulations within the same period.
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