New World Bank loan for Bangladesh’s public procurement project

The World Bank has approved $10 million in additional financing to help Bangladesh scale up its electronic procurement system for “more effective and efficient” use of public funds, the global lender says.

This additional financing, approved in Washington on Monday, for the ‘Public Procurement Reform Project II’ will help set up a new state-of-the-art data centre with 200 terra-byte storage capacity.

This will also help to set up a mirror site to replace an existing lower capacity data centre to keep pace with an exponential growth in the demand for electronic procurement from public procurement entities.

With robust security features and 180 times more capacity, the new centre will offer storage for 8.6 million tenders and support about 325,000 registered bidders, the Bank said in a statement.

The financing will also help the project continue professional certification and training in public procurement.

The additional financing takes the World Bank’s support to the project to $68.10 million.

The credit from the Bank’s International Development Association has a 38-year term, including a six-year grace period, and a service charge of 0.75 percent.

The project, in 2011, rolled out electronic procurement and online performance monitoring systems in four public procuring entities - transport, local government, water, and power.

Known as e-Gp, electronic government procurement reduced tender processing time from 51 days in 2012 to 29 days in 2015, and the number of registered bidders grew 35-fold, to 18,000 over the same period.

Since Aug 2015, Bangladesh has processed more than 32,000 government tenders online at a total value of about $3.7 billion.

“The World Bank believes in strengthening country systems. We are happy to see how quickly the bidder community, even at the local level, has embraced electronic procurement. We are also helping create procurement professionals in the country,” country director Qimiao Fan said.​