E-procurement model for the public sector of Kenya

Abstract

The public procurement in the Kenyan has been undergoing reforms starting with the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2005 that saw the creation of Public Procurement Oversight Authority. The next step was the implementation of e-procurement for the public sector. According to e-government strategy paper 2004, e-procurement was one of the medium term objectives which was to be implemented by June 2007, but the process has been very slow. The manual processes are costly, slow, inefficient and data storage and retrieval poor. This project sought to determine e-procurement practices in public sector, find the factors for slow adoption, existing models in use, and then develop a model for the Kenyan public sector. The methodology used was questionnaires sent out to respondents, interviews and also through existing literature. Several models have been tried by different countries to implement e-procurement, These are seller centric buyer centric, e-marketplaces or third party managed. In some countries these models are summarized into three: public, the mixed model and public private partnerships. The findings show that most of the procurement processes are still manual with the internet only being used for e-rnails and web browsing. The factors for slow adoption include limited legislation, poor infrastructure, lack of awareness and top management support, integration with internal systems/solutions, lack of technical standards, lack of cooperation on the part of suppliers, costs associated with adapting web-enabled purchasing system The proposed model for the Kenyan public sector is the public model where the government will own all the investment risks as well as benefits. This model favours the SMEs doing business with public sector, offers easier integration and since its government owned, it will gain a lot of support from to managers. E-procurement is not as simple as just providing a catalogue on the Internet. E-procurement is not suitable for all products and several systems needs to be put together to achieve results. Sound strategy also needs to be put in place.