Policy Brief: Data infrastructure in Tanzania

The publication of data about government procurement is widely perceived to be beneficial in terms of improving transparency over a significant area of public spending. Transparency in public procurement is associated with greater scrutiny over processes and outcomes, helping to improve accountability in order to achieve enhanced competition, better value for money and reduced corruption.

In 2017, as part of a project on Statistics for Integrity in Public Contracting, our team together with the African Data Initiative collected Tanzanian public procurement data from the Public Procurement Regulatory Agency’s (PPRA) online bulletin and the Tanzanian Procurement Journal. This put us in a position to offer some observations on how Tanzania’s procurement data infrastructure currently functions and recommendations on how it might be improved in the future.

As a member of the Open Government Partnership since 2011, the Tanzanian government has consistently emphasised commitments to establishing an open data system and has made good progress in this regard. However, we make several further recommendations for action that would make the system more detailed, useful and robust.

Download here: Tanzania Procurement Data Policy Brief 2017