The World Bank yesterday approved $40 million to help Bangladesh increase the coverage of electronic government procurement (e-GP) with new features to respond to the Covid-19 challenges.

This is an additional financing to the Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project (DIMAPPP), which the multilateral lender approved in 2017 to improve public procurement performance.

The World Bank committed to provide $55 million for the project, which aims to restructure the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) and institutionalize e-GP as well as enhancing digitisation of public procurement.

The latest financing will help add important features to the e-GP system, including international bidding, direct contracting, framework agreement, electronic contract management and payment, procurement data analytics, geo-tagging and enable, the World Bank said.

"Bangladesh has made systematic changes to improve the public procurement environment, including digitising the system. During the general holiday for the Covid-19 pandemic, e-GP played a critical role in continuing development works throughout the country." said World Bank Country Director for Bangladesh and Bhutan Mercy Tembon.

"This financing will help ensure 100 per cent use of e-GP and upgrade the system to enable the country to continue ensuring timely and quality public works and public service delivery," Tembon added.

The financing will help strengthen the emergency procurement procedures and develop a roadmap for sustainable procurement.

It will also build a provision to support the small and medium-sized and women-led enterprises and scaling-up citizen engagement in public procurement.

The multilateral lender said it has been supporting the government to improve public procurement since 2002.

With the World Bank's help, the government rolled out e-GP in four procuring entities. 

In FY 2019-20, $17.5 billion worth of procurement contracts, representing about 62 per cent of public procurement expenditure in the country, were processed through the e-GP system.

During the pandemic, e-GP enabled over 1,300 public organisations to process all procurement activities online following national competitive procurement methods.

The additional financing will help enhance the capacity of the e-GP data center and improve cyber-security. It will ensure countrywide rollout of the electronic contract management and payment module with the provision of uploading geo-tagged images, the World Bank said.

"The digitization of public procurement was a game-changer for both the public and private sector. It helped to increase efficiency and transparency and made doing business easier," said World Bank Team Leader for the project Ishtiak Siddique.

To complete the ongoing and new activities, the project has been extended by one and a half years till December 31, 2023. With this extra financing, the World Bank's support to the project now stands at $95 million.