EBRD Open Government Lab

EBRD Open Government Lab, has first started in 2015 in Ukraine in collaboration with Transparency International Ukraine and Open Contracting Partnership to research, innovate and pilot policies for digital government building on the concepts of Open Government and ‘civic tech for public service’. And it started with supporting Ukraine’s ProZorro revolution.

Pilot projects are exploring Open Government approach to public policy and prototype rules and digital tools for shared/collaborative public service by public and private sector. Latest projects are testing open online marketplaces for buying and selling for public sector as well as data-driven reporting, monitoring and audit methodologies for government enforcement agencies. Lab pilot projects have been developed with Armenia, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Slovak Republic and Ukraine.

In Ukraine the stakes for taxpayers are huge – annual public procurement budget is valued at up to US$ 20 billion. Following decades of concealment and corruption, which allowed the country’s ruling elite to exploit the state procurement system in their interests, 2015 brought two seismic shifts: Ukraine joined the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), and introduced an electronic procurement system for state purchasing of goods, works and services.

The EBRD Legal Transition Programme worked with the government on both initiatives throughout a time of great political turbulence in Ukraine. In 2012, the Bank started to support the Ukrainian government to navigate the Ukraine’s GPA negotiation process and promote adoption of the WTO public procurement policy standards. Upon successful completion of the GPA negotiations in September 2015, the focus of the EBRD support shifted to meeting GPA transparency standards in practice by introducing electronic public procurement and independent public procurement complaints mechanism. Recognising innovative ideas of civic activists from Maidan, the Bank supported the pilot of “ProZorro”, a new concept of the e-procurement system based on Open Contracting Data Standard.

Prozorro means transparent in Ukrainian, and the system launched in February 2015 aimed to achieve full transparency of public procurement decisions by making “everyone see everything” online. To achieve that the ProZorro system connected a new open source and OCDS-based central database to the existing commercial electronic platforms in Ukraine to ensure online public procurement data exchange and publication in the open data OCDS format in real-time. This approach is making procurement information literally open to anyone and reduces corruption risks significantly. At the same time real-time access to procurement data is very efficient - procurement officers across Ukraine call pull information on suppliers and contracts or publish new online tenders in a few minutes, something which would take days in many richer countries. The ProZorro pilot has been very successful – it attracted almost 1000 contracting entities within first three months of operation. Local suppliers started to trust the public procurement market for the first time, which means competition has grown and Ukrainian taxpayers started to get better value for money. Made mandatory on 1 April 2016, the ProZorro system won several international awards. Today, the Bank works with Transparency International Ukraine on prototyping specialised tools for ProZorro and exploring opportunities behind open source and open data solutions in digital government.

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