The 29th of July 2022 marked a significant milestone in Lebanon's governance as a new Public Procurement Law No. 244/2021 entered into force, with the hope to bring transparency, efficiency, and accountability to the country's public procurement practices. Since the legislation of the law, Gherbal has dedicated part of its efforts to monitor the law’s implementation. In collaboration with the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the Institut des Finances Basil Fuleihan, Gherbal created a citizen guide aimed at simplifying the complexity of the new Public Procurement Law, rendering it more accessible and comprehensible for all. Gherbal has diligently crafted and released this guide in both English and Arabic. The guide enables various stakeholders, including those from the public and private sectors, academia, civil society, citizens, and international donor agencies, to engage with the principles and provisions encompassed within this legislation concerning the procurement process and the governance of the Public Procurement System. The guide casts a spotlight on the most notable provisions and regulations inherent in this modern and reformative law. These provisions work cohesively to enhance the efficiency, competitiveness, transparency, and accountability of public procurement practices, all in alignment with international standards.
In parallel, and in order to facilitate the work of the public administrations and their staff in order to abide by the requirements of the law, Gherbal has published a Transparency Charter allowing those entities to assess their level of abidance by the law by answering provided questions. These questions are related to the different stages and substages of the bidding mechanism, e.g. “Procurement Planning”, “Procurement Procedures”, “Choosing the Procurement Method”...
Gherbal also designed a Key Performance Index (KPI) so that citizens can measure the performance of the procuring entities and their adherence to the eight principles of public procurement, especially integrity and transparency.
In addition to the above-mentioned publications, Gherbal launched Monaqasa platform “https://monaqasa.org/” that serves as a monitoring depository to all announced bids.
Hence, all visitors of the platform (individuals, small and medium enterprises, oversight bodies, researchers…) will be able to navigate through the announced bids and check their statuses: whether they are still active, or have been awarded or cancelled, as well as the names of the winning bidders, the contracts’ values, and much more.
Along with the research work and the monitoring platform, Gherbal organized a series of workshops all over Lebanon to expand the knowledge of participants (25-35 in each workshop) on the new Public Procurement Law and answer their questions. The targeted audience of these workshops is divided between citizens (including CSOs and SMEs) and administrators.
To further solidify these efforts, Gherbal Initiative is launching this report to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Public Procurement Law publication. The report aims to evaluate the implementation of the law’s provisions, as well as the quantitative figures of announced bids, the number of administrations that engaged in bids’ operations, the sectors and services under which these bids were conducted, the location of these bids (districts), and much more relevant information.
This report is sought to assess the extent to which the Public Procurement Law has influenced procurement processes, fostered transparency, and contributed to the overall improvement of the procurement landscape in Lebanon. This report monitors all the tenders that were collected by Gherbal from Public Procurement Authority website, National Gazette, public administrations’ websites and other sources which were posted to https://monaqasa.org/en portal and then followed up by calls and visits to gather information on the bids’ winners and the values of signed contracts.
This report is intended to be a valuable tool for policy-makers, stakeholders, journalists and researchers seeking to understand the progress made and the challenges hindering the effective implementation of the law. In fact, through this report, Gherbal aims to shed light on the administrations that abided by the law and those who did not. Using the collected data, a comprehensive analysis was performed.
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