WHAT CHANGED AND HOW DID OGP CONTRIBUTE?
OGP Commitments Delivered Real Results
- Leading the way: 59 percent of OGP countries are currently disclosing contracting data in OCDS format. This is more than four times as many as non-OGP countries.
- Concrete results: Nearly 50 countries have achieved concrete results during their action plans, such as newly disclosed contracting data, new legislation mandating greater openness, and greater involvement of CSOs.
- Embedding public participation: 27 OGP countries involved the public while implementing their open contracting reforms. In 11 of these countries, there is clear evidence that collaboration with civil society organizations shaped procurement policies, platforms, and/or legislation.
- Tangible economic effects: In 10 OGP countries, open contracting reforms produced economic impacts such as greater government efficiency, more competitiveness among suppliers, and lower procurement costs.
OGP’s Contribution
- Multi-stakeholder collaboration: OGP helped formalize collaboration between the government and civil society in Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Romania, giving them a shared reform roadmap and the political legitimacy to push ambitious data‑openness and oversight measures.
- Iterative reforms: Successive OGP action plans enabled Indonesia, Romania, and Kaduna State (Nigeria) to sequence their commitments into strategic, multi-year reforms.
- Resources & incentives: OGP membership and commitments helped frame Makueni County’s (Kenya) portal as a flagship anti‑corruption reform and attracted support from Hivos and the Hewlett Foundation, with Development Gateway providing technical development and training. In Romania, the transparency in spending of large local development funds supported its OECD accession process, creating an external incentive to maintain and deepen the reforms beyond a single action plan.
Public procurement is the lifeblood of economies as governments award contracts to deliver public goods and services, often creating jobs along the way. From bridges and hospitals to necessities like medicine and school lunches, these contracts shape people’s daily lives and represent a staggering investment from governments. The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) estimates that governments spend about one in every three dollars on public contracts, or about USD 13 trillion each year.
Yet members of the public often do not have visibility into the suppliers, terms, costs, and deadlines of these contracts, even though this work is funded through taxpayer dollars. This makes public procurement highly vulnerable to corruption and fraud. When funds go missing, local communities pay the price: public goods are left half-built and essential supplies go undelivered.
This is where open contracting comes in. It makes the entire public procurement process more transparent, participatory, and accountable to everyone. Making public contracting information open, timely, and accessible allows for better decision-making, monitoring, and oversight. This makes open contracting a powerful tool to combat corruption.
Since its inception, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) has played a key role in advancing open contracting among its members, in collaboration with its partners at the Open Contracting Partnership, as well as CoST – Infrastructure Transparency Initiatve, Development Gateway, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Hivos, Natural Resource Governance Institute, and the Open Data Charter.
15 Years of Progress
Over the past 15 years, OGP has helped establish open contracting as a global norm. Collectively, 59 percent of OGP countries (nearly two-thirds of the Partnership) are currently disclosing contracting data in Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format which defines a common data model for contracting transparency. This is more than four times as many as non-OGP countries, only 13 percent of which do the same.
Nearly 50 OGP countries have achieved concrete outcomes while implementing reforms. This includes disclosure of contracting information, legislation mandating greater openness, and channels for the public to trigger investigations.
- Legislation: 15 countries have passed legislation or regulation through OGP to make public procurement more open, successfully institutionalizing the reform in government.
- Access to information: More than 40 countries have made more procurement information publicly available by passing legislation, publishing data, or creating public procurement portals.
- Civic participation:Civil society was involved in OC reforms in 27 OGP countries, either through consultations, joint shaping of policy, or use of OC data to promote accountability.
The Partnership has played a significant role in supporting this remarkable progress. For example, OGP helped formalize collaboration between the government and civil society in Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mongolia and Romania, giving them a shared reform roadmap and the political legitimacy to push ambitious data openness and oversight measures. Successive action plans also enabled Indonesia, Romania, and Kaduna State (Nigeria) to sequence their reform trajectories into strategic, multi-year reforms. For example, Indonesia began with reforms to strengthen the legal basis for procurement transparency in earlier action plans to formal complaint and enforcement mechanisms in more recent action plans. Similarly, in Romania, the transparency in spending of large local development funds supported its OECD accession process, creating an external incentive to maintain and deepen the reforms beyond a single action‑plan cycle.
This investment in open contracting has led to cost savings and greater efficiency in procurement processes. For example, Ukraine used the OGP platform to publish public procurement data online through its ProZorro platform, which links to the country’s beneficial ownership and State Treasury databases and accepts public feedback and investigation requests. As a result of this reform, research found that Ukraine saved about US 6 billion between October 2017 and 2021.
This impact is also visible at the local level. The government in Kaduna State, Nigeria applied the Open Contracting Data Standard to publish public procurement data and train the public on how to use it. By April 2025, Kaduna’s portal disclosed 1,379 projects worth NGN 95.7 billion (USD 59.4 million). As a result, a local resident identified and reported discrepancies in the construction of Rigasa General Hospital in the state, which prompted the Deputy Governor to revoke a flawed contract.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As the following examples from OGP members show, this approach has saved money, improved public service delivery, and increased competition all around the world.
Mongolia
Mongolia has made significant progress in digitalizing its public procurement process and publishing contracting data on a public platform. The new platform links information about tenders, bids, and contract winners in one place. Users can also search by categories such as date, name of tender, portfolio manager, and category of work, in line with newly amended regulations. Journalists and civil society organizations (CSOs) have already used the new digital platform to combat corruption. For example, the Mongolian Data Club discovered that only “ten companies supplied almost 70 percent” of the procurement market in the country, which is worth about USD 1.7 billion. They also identified 535 mid-level public officials and politicians who had links to companies bidding on public contracts. In 2023, the government began work on a red flagging system to identify potential violations.
Romania
Romania has two funds worth RON 100 billion (about USD 22 billion) to support local, sustainable development projects: the National Local Development Plan, which targets rural areas, and the Anghel Saligny Program, which focuses on infrastructure investments like roads and water treatment plants. Following concerns about mismanagement and fraud, Romania used open contracting reform to increase transparency about how the government spends these funds over the course of three OGP action plans, building on the work of its multi-stakeholder forum. Now, the government regularly publishes implementation data on these funds on a new platform, allowing civil society and journalists to monitor and report any irregularities. The data includes lists of completed projects as well as their status, location, public procurement information, and suppliers. Civil society and journalists have reportedly used contracting data to publish articles on corruption scandals in the country.
Local Governments in Colombia
Colombia has advanced open contracting at the local level as a key anti-corruption tool since the early days of its OGP membership. By 2017, the country published public procurement data on the school meals program in the capital city of Bogotá. This commitment achieved 10-15 percent of savings in the government budget for this program, more than quadrupled the number of suppliers participating in the procurement process, and helped end a suspected USD 22 million price-fixing scheme. A few years later, the city of Palmira collaborated with the national government to implement open contracting reforms to increase the diversity of businesses bidding for contracts. As a result, the local government awarded contracts to local producers for the first time, including women-led businesses. At the time of writing, the national government is collaborating with Santiago de Cali to weave open contracting and public participation into the city’s governance. So far, Santiago de Cali has dramatically increased competition among suppliers, created an online platform for users to report damage to infrastructure and track construction projects, and created the city’s first road women-only maintenance crew.
Kenya
In 2019, Kenya amended its legal framework to require companies to submit information on their real owners (also known as “beneficial owners”) before bidding for contracts. Beyond connecting these critical pieces of data, the government also launched a new, digital platform for public procurement in April 2025. In line with the Open Contracting Data Standard, the tool automates the entire procurement process from planning and tendering to payment, while consolidating procurement data across ministries, departments, agencies, and local governments. This national progress is complemented by county-level reforms, such as in Makueni, which launched its own portal in 2019. Within a year, the county portal had increased procurement competitiveness and efficiency, with one estimate showing that Makueni saved more than KES 30 million (about USD 264,000) in the Roads Department.
Ecuador
Ecuador began its commitment to publish contracting data in 2019. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit soon after, the government worked with civil society to rapidly launch an emergency purchasing platform in May 2020, aggregating all emergency contracts from national and local entities in one open data portal. Within weeks, it listed over 2,500 contracts from more than 570 entities, ultimately expanding to about 8,300 emergency contracts worth roughly USD 247 million. Civil society and journalists used this data to identify overpriced medical supplies (including N95 masks and body bags) and other irregularities, triggering more than 50 legal cases related to pandemic procurement and leading to the suspension or correction of dubious contracts. The government also turned the emergency portal into a real‑time dashboard and trained around 24,000 public officials on how to run emergency procurement more efficiently and transparently, improving practice well beyond the initial crisis. In 2021, Ecuador launched a unified open contracting platform that includes non-emergency contracts, which supports the monitoring platform run by Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo, the Transparency International chapter based in the country.
Indonesia
Over several action plans, Indonesia created binding rules and standards requiring the publication of public contracting data. Working together, the National Public Procurement Agency (LKPP) and Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) created Opentender.net, a national online risk‑monitoring tool that aggregates data on more than 1.8 million bids from 629 procuring entities since 2008. The platform also analyzes red‑flag indicators like low competition and non‑competitive methods of procurement. Evidence from Opentender has directly contributed to prosecutions and convictions in at least five major corruption cases, with estimated losses of at least USD 18 million. The government has also trained state auditors on how to use the platform, which has helped improve the efficiency and coverage of audits by as much as 200 percent, according to OCP. The partnership between the government and CSOs like ICW and Transparency International Indonesia has helped ensure the success and sustainability of these reforms.
Looking Ahead
As OGP members look ahead to the next 15 years, the challenge is to keep strengthening safeguards against corruption in public procurement while ensuring that open contracting delivers broader public value. The next phase of reform will depend on using procurement data more effectively to improve oversight and support better, more sustainable public service delivery. This can be done by connecting key datasets to public contracting data, such as beneficial ownership and licensing information. Showing the results of open contracting more clearly and making these systems more useful in practice is a crucial focus for the future. That means using procurement data not only to identify risks, but also to improve value for money, lower costs, increase competition, and help governments deliver better outcomes for communities. It also means telling that story more clearly, so people can see how open contracting leads to things like lower medicine costs, stronger flood protection, and better targeted public spending.
OGP members are already making strides to advance this next level of open contracting reform.
For example, Brazil has committed to spending BRL 240 billion on infrastructure projects as part of its Growth Acceleration Program (PAC, in Portuguese) between 2023 and 2026. To deliver on the promises of this investment, Brazil is building on its existing transparency portals, legal requirements to publish public contracting data, and culture of public participation to apply open contracting principles to its federal infrastructure projects. In this Open Gov Challenge commitment, the country is also focusing on empowering members of the public to monitor how contracts are awarded and whether projects are completed. As Izabela Moreira Corrêa, the former Secretary for Public Integrity at the CGU, explained in an interview with OGP, “Transparency and active social participation in infrastructure projects are key to safeguarding the public interest, ensuring that projects align with government objectives and meet citizens’ needs while responsibly utilizing public resources.”
The United Kingdom is also advancing open contracting through its latest OGP commitment, which is also part of the Open Gov Challenge. Over several years, the government has worked with civil society, the Spend Network, and Open Contracting Partnership to improve the scope and quality of public contracting data and to start centralizing it. These updates have already allowed civil society and journalists to better monitor and investigate how public procurement funds are used. For example, BBC Newsnight used this data to investigate what local councils spent on housing for vulnerable teenagers, discovering that the care fell short of what authorities and their contractors were expected to provide. Thanks to the UK’s new Public Procurement Act, which took effect in February 2025, the government is now poised to make its public contracting data more open and easier to understand. Over the next two years, the United Kingdom aims to create publicly available dashboards, which will make it easier for civil society and government oversight bodies to monitor contracts across the procurement cycle and track red flag indicators and other key metrics.
Looking ahead, one important area for future work is connecting different datasets to show the full picture of how public resources are spent. This includes linking data on public contracts, beneficial owners, asset and interest disclosures, licensing, and taxes to detect red flags, uncover collusion, and save money. As Open Ownership explains, “Knowing who really owns and benefits from companies bidding for government contracts helps protect limited public resources, prevent financial losses, and ensure funds are used for their intended purpose, ultimately benefitting citizens.”
Another key element is empowering members of the public, including journalists and CSOs, to support oversight of public procurement systems through dedicated training and outreach. This includes research and engagement to ensure that open data portals for public contracts are easy to understand and use. When members of the public play a role in monitoring government contracts, it provides a necessary layer of accountability to prevent and detect abuse.
With these goals in mind, OGP members are well-positioned to translate these ambitions into action at the country and local level. Looking ahead, the Partnership aims to support reform coalitions, encourage innovation, and make the case for why open contracting matters in everyday life.