Infrastructure Ministry Hosts Training to Curb Corruption in Procurement Practices

Some forty contractors, public officers, and engineers engaged in a training session today that outlined proper procurement methods and processes.  The procurement process in both private and public sectors has been known to be bypassed in several ways that essentially lead to corruption and preferential selections.  Minister of Infrastructure Development and Housing (MIDH), Julius Espat, has been a constant advocate for due process, transparency, and accountability.  In that continuous advocacy, his ministry arranged the workshop with support from international funding agencies such as the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB). According to Espat, much of the procurements that occur within the government involve the approval from the Contractor General, who he says has been meticulous over the past four years.

Julius Espat, Minister of Infrastructure Development: “I  don’t know how you can push a contractor general. We have not been able to do that. Especially when the last two, we only dealt with two, they are very meticulous, very tedious. It’s not that you get your contracts approved initially. They sit with you and say, we have concerns, this is not signed properly, this procedure might need to be done. So they are very meticulous. And so I don’t know what else we can do. If the person that holds that position takes it seriously, it works. What we have had is in the past government is that there wasn’t a contractor general in place for many years. And that’s where I believe your comment came from. We have been open. Whenever the media has requested any information from our ministry, we have provided them. In fact, Jules has requested contracts from us in the past and we have provided it to him. But yes, we are failing.”

Reporter: But should we have to ask ? 

Julius Espat, Minister of Infrastructure Development: “No. You are taking us to a level that we all want to achieve and I believe the government of Belize is presently working on that right now with the digitization of the entire ministries. It’s not only MIDH it’s all ministries. And so they are working on a portal that is not specific per ministry. In fact, they have opened up a central procurement unit that is in charge of that under the Ministry of Finance. They are going through, I think, the final phases in how to address the digitization of contracts. But yes, it’s important. We will try as best as we can to be as open as we possibly can. The bureaucracy in government is more than the private sector is used to. So with our experience it takes a while. If you centralize it, what the central procurement unit proposes to do hopefully it is more efficient because you’re dealing, you’re pooling together talent to be able to make it faster. That’s the concept.”

The CDB’s Head of Procurement Douglas Fraser presented various aspects of improving the procurement process and methods of ensuring transparency. He explained that while Belize’s procurement system isn’t perfect, it has seen much improvement in the past few years. 

Douglas Fraser, Head of Procurement, CDB: “This morning I was talking about two main areas. One is the importance of planning and taking time to look at the wider context before embarking on a procurement process. And the other area that I was speaking to is how to conduct a bidding process, best practice. I think generally public procurement is still a developing area across the region and internationally actually. So it’s an emerging profession and I think therefore it’s natural that we have events such as this to deepen professional expertise and experience. The two areas though that I would pull out that I think, not just here in Belize but generally across the region we’re looking to support our countries with are planning and evaluation because those are sort of critical areas in the process. So I think this is, as you said, part of a longer term initiative and we’ve had a long and very fruitful relationship with the Government of Belize. So I think we’ll be looking with our partners at IDB to do similar events, we’re already discussing potentially another one next year. And we also have our own resources we make available to our clients. We have online procurement learning which is available at no cost and we also run things such as scholarships for procurement leaders of the future. That’s something we did actually in collaboration with IDB this year for a Masters program in Italy. And we’re very happy actually that there’s a candidate who’s been selected from Belize to go on that program.”

The ministry says it hopes to hold similar workshops in the future