{"id":22311,"date":"2019-10-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/itid\/rehabilitating-ukraines-economy-with-technology\/"},"modified":"2023-02-15T11:59:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T11:59:44","slug":"rehabilitating-ukraines-economy-with-technology","status":"publish","type":"itid","link":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/itid\/rehabilitating-ukraines-economy-with-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Rehabilitating Ukraine\u2019s Economy with Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ProZorro is a public e-procurement system that has become a catalyzer in Ukraine\u2019s fight for transparency. Driven by activists, sponsor-backed, and widely acknowledged ProZorro has indeed become something like a magic pill for the previously corrupt, shaken by a few revolutions Ukraine\u2019s economy. We tried to find out why public procurement is important and learned how a Ukrainian software solutions provider is helping to reshape the old system of buying supplies.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Transforming public e-procurement\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

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It all started back in 2013 when Ukraine\u2019s wish for closer ties with Europe and the need for vital national reforms lead to Euromaidan revolution. Among thousands of activists, there was Oleksandr Starodubtsev who was particularly concerned about the Ukrainian government systems being corrupt the core. A few months later, Starodubtsev\u2019s call for transparency brought about ProZorro <\/span>\u2013<\/span> an online public procurement system, meant to become a place where public agencies could secure see-through tenders and fair deals.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since becoming an obligatory tool for every public procurement taking place within the country in 2016, ProZorro united more than 25 000 clients, 150 000 vendors, and helped to settle <\/span>2 million contracts. <\/b>The obvious advantage of ProZorro is very simple <\/span>\u2013<\/span> it is saving lots of money. For example, in the past two years, Ukraine\u2019s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade saved over <\/span>\u20b4 <\/span>55 billion, Naftogaz (national oil and gas company of Ukraine) <\/span>\u2013<\/span> \u20b4 15 billion, and Ukrpost (<\/span>national postal service) spent <\/span>\u20b4 <\/span>500 million less than it initially planned.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/i><\/b>The system\u2019s ambitious motto \u201cEveryone sees everything\u201d is, in fact, true. Once a tender is registered online, the system allows you to see information on submitted proposals, documents, decisions of the tender commission, etc. In addition, ProZorro has introduced a special risk management system, allowing the State Audit Service to monitor tenders that appear to be suspicious.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In August 2017, the World Bank completed verifying whether ProZorro meets the requirements of multilateral development banks. Followed by the positive results, ProZorro launched the first tender for a project funded by the World Bank in April 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What makes ProZorro really stand out is a unique combination of partners involved, also known as the \u201cgolden triangle of partnership\u201d. Driven by the urgent need for reforms in the country, the representatives of business, government, and civil society got together and took the lead to develop a project that has now become a trademark for Ukraine\u2019s public procurement transparency. One of the key players in this process was Quintagroup.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Quintagroup comes on board<\/b><\/p>\n

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Quintagroup, a Ukrainian software solutions company based in Lviv, has a long history of working with Open Procurement both for commercial and public projects. In 2014, Quintagroup joined ProZorro. We approached Ihor Berehulyak, Quintagroup\u2019s CEO, to talk about the launch of the project.<\/span> \u201cWe already had expertise in developing a spectrum auction for a client from the UK and were looking for similar projects. On September 5, 2014, the \u201cfounding father\u201d of ProZorro Oleksandr Starodubtsev organized a big meeting of the stakeholders to start working on the transformation of public procurement in Ukraine,\u201d tells Berehulyak. \u201cFrom the very beginning, our CTO Myroslav Opyr took an active part in what was then just a voluntary project and supported the idea of open source software for public procurement. By the end of September, it was agreed that Quintagroup will develop and launch the pilot version of the system that will unite seven different marketplaces\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Transparency International supported the project in late November, a big part of the pilot system had already been developed and further development was possible thanks to contributions from various international organizations.<\/span><\/p>\n

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According to Ihor Berehulyak, the main task of ProZorro is to make data public and establish fair rules in the system of public procurement: if any action is improper, the information will remain public forever, available for analysis to public organizations, journalists, and controlling entities.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/i><\/b>Quintagroup\u2019s contribution to ProZorro turned out to be an extensive one <\/span>\u2013<\/span> the company has developed the central database, the auction module (including 6 types of auctions for systems similar to ProZorro) and the API through which marketplaces connect to the system. For the last 4 years, Quintagroup has also been responsible for system administration, monitoring, and automated testing of websites.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Ihor Berehulyak admits that there were certain challenges on the way. \u201cAccording to Ukrainian legislation, we had to transfer the project from Amazon to Ukraine, it was a rather complex process. Sometimes we had to develop new services for the system in a very short time after the law was passed. Still, in my opinion, it\u2019s a successful project. I don\u2019t know any other well-known digital transformation project in Ukraine that would make such a contribution from the point of view of open data and the fight against corruption.\u201d\u00a0\"prozorro-02\"<\/span>Foreign acknowledgment <\/b><\/p>\n

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After being frowned upon by many, ProZorro has proved to be a success, another system was put in the works <\/span>\u2013 Prozorro Sale. <\/span>Similar in its principles, ProZorro Sale is seeking transparency in everything that is sold by the state\u2019s public enterprises. In 4 years, Quintagroup developed many services for both systems. At the end of last year, the company finished developing framework agreements for ProZorro and land lease and small privatization systems for ProzorroSale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to Quintagroup\u2019s cooperation with EBRD and Transparency International a public procurement system was launched in Moldova <\/span>\u2013<\/span> a project called MTender. Since the core of ProZorro is made up of the OpenProcurement.io platform, a variety of projects in other countries could be launched. According to Ihor Berehulyak, the company is now negotiating with different organizations, but the nature of government projects is slow everywhere. \u201cIt takes a lot of time and effort, but we hope to contribute to launching similar systems abroad\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thanks to cooperation with Open Contracting Partnership (supported by the World Bank Group), Quintagroup has made Prozorro one of the first systems in the world where procurement data became available in Open Contracting Data Standard for analytical systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/i><\/b>In a short span of time, ProZorro has not only managed to considerably reduce the amount of money spent on public procurement but also received wide recognition. In 2016, ProZorro was awarded the World Procurement Award, having outrun the UK Ministry of Justice, Australian NSW Department of Education and even the Administration of the US President. A year later, Prozorro.Sale won in the demo-days of the Citi Tech for Integrity Challenge (CitiT4IChallenge) anti-corruption startups finals held in Hyderabad, India. In 2018, the project won \u201cThe Shield in the Cloud Innovation Challenge\u201d anti-corruption award from C5 Accelerate and USA Institute of Peace and received worldwide recognition as the best anti-corruption startup in public administration. These awards are an important acknowledgment that Ukrainian IT products can compete with other markets, and while it\u2019s still a long way towards complete transparency in Ukraine, reforms like this one, indeed, bring hope.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22312,"template":"","itid":[],"class_list":["post-22311","itid","type-itid","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/itid\/22311"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/itid"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/itid"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"itid","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itcluster.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/itid?post=22311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}