The New Dawn Government has aspirations of improving public procurement processes in order to procure value for money goods, works and services for the public sector. It is for this reason that the Ministry of Community of Community Development and Social Services with support from USAID ACHIEVE project held a two-day in-house workshop to train Ministerial Procurement Committee on the processes of procurement as stipulated in the Public Procurement Act No. 8 of 2020.

The workshop was officially opened by the Permanent Secretary, Mrs. Beatrice Chilufya Darko, the Chairperson of the Ministerial Procurement Committee, who emphasised the need for the members of the Procurement Committee to familiarise themselves with the new law and the use of the electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) system. She was happy that the training was coming at a time when the Ministry had just begun implementing the process of the E-GP system in procurement.

The Permanent Secretary was grateful to the ACHIEVE Project for coming on board to strengthen the capacity of the Ministerial Procurement Committee to improve fiscal accountability in the Ministry. She noted that one of the key objectives for the ACHIEVE Project was to strengthen the capacity of the MCDSS to improve fiscal accountability to be able to efficiently manage the anticipated United States Government-to-Government (G2G) funds. This workshop contributed to realizing this objective. Furthermore, the workshop was very important for the ministry because it was enabling them to actualize the vision of His Excellency the President Mr Hakainde Hichilema of ensuring that procurements were done transparently, at lowest possible cost and within the confines of the law.

The orientation was facilitated by the Zambia Public Procurement Authority (ZPPA) who emphasized the need for a mind-set change in the members of the Procurement Committee and procurement officers so that they are able to embrace new ways of doing business as provided for in the new law. The Public Procurement Act of 2020 was enacted to replace the Public Procurement Act (PPA) No.12 of 2008 which was based on paper or manual system of procurement. This system had gaps which included lack of transparency; human interface at every stage leading to loss of objectivity and it disadvantaged geographically spread bidders to participate. Furthermore, it had long chains of internal authorization and caused contract management challenges. The new law had, however, removed all these challenges and emphasized on E-Government Procurement system which will make all procurement to be transparent and efficient.