Implementation Strategies of the Public Procurement Law in Kenya: a Case Study of Public Procurement Oversight Authority

Abstract

Procurement encompasses the whole process of acquiring property and/or services. It begins when an agency has identified a need and decided on its procurement requirement. Procurement continues through the processes of risk assessment, seeking and evaluating alternative solutions, contract award, delivery of and payment for the property and/or services and, where relevant, the ongoing management of a contract and consideration of options related to the contract. Procurement also extends to the ultimate disposal of property at the end of its useful life. Sound public procurement policies and practices are among the essential elements of good governance. The study collected both primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected through physical interaction with the interviewees while secondary data was obtained from organization records, brochures, website, and published scholarly articles and from Procurement Laws. The data was collected by way of an interview guide whose questions were open-ended to give the interviewee the chance to expound on any issues that required further probing. The method also allowed for collection of supplementary information and the ability to exercise control during the interviewing session. Content analysis was used to analyse the collected data. Content analysis is systematic since the content to be analyzed is selected according to explicit and consistently applied rules which ensure that the selected samples are fully representative. It also enables the researcher to describe and gave a good quick picture of how variables are distributed. The study findings established that challenges significantly impacted on the implementation of public procurement laws and effectiveness of it procurement system. The study also found out that there were some problems in the acquisition of the reports from the Government Ministries and department. This was associated with difficulties in finding meaningful data and statistics in the manual system; registers and logs with good design were difficult to find; summarizing data and writing reports took a lot of time; duplication of data was also another problem because the same data got repeated over and over since the workers found it hard to keep track of the documents, information and transactions. Lack of data security was also another challenge because the data that was stored in filing cabinets was freely available to anyone. Other problems that the Authority experienced due to the use of manual systems were inconsistency of data, too much paper work, space consuming, and slow retrieval of data. The study further revealed that due to the above challenges, the organization had to come up with the best strategies in ICT in order to be able to cope up with the changes in the ICT Sector.