About the Project

The database for more transparent procurements and Albanian Development Fund in the Local Government coincides with a catalog of transparent open data on tender procedures in 61 Municipalities in the Country. It contains well structured information for every procurement procedure or contract regarding public issues; purchase of goods; service contracts or public private partnerships (PPP).

The database and the catalog are in line with the Open Contracting Partnership’s principles and standards.

The data represent each tender procedure starting from July 1st, 2015. More specifically, the source of the well structured data displayed in this website are governmental publications, such as:

• Official website of Public Procurement Agency (APP) – sections Notices, Procurement Forecast, Procurement Realizations and other notices
• Public notices’s newsletter, weekly publications with information on procurements and public procedures;
• Official website of Public Procurement Commission (KPP), tender decisions to which the appeal procedure applies;
• Publications in the official website of the Ministry of Finance on treasury transactions;
• National Business Center’s database

The aim of the well structured information is to be accessible to the public at any time (consistent), easily readable, easy to use and re-use (conversion fo tender passports into JSON or Excel format), easily understood. The above-mentioned standards are not applicable in the official governmental publications.

RedFlag is a system for quality assessment and scanning of procurement procedures. It automatically selects and marks, through algorithms, some procedures that present indexes of potential risk for illegal, unethical behaviors, higher risk of favoritism, lack of competition and potential risk for unequal competition.

The database and the RedFlags algorithm empower some important civilian groups such as:

• taxpayers understand how their money are being spent
• journalists prepare fact-based reports
• other actors, part of the programs for transparency and monitoring, watchdog

The RedFlag instrument is incorporated with the intent to highlight real-time indications on tenders and contracts with higher misuse probability, unequal competition, favoritism, clientelism or corruption.

In the context of this project, the term Procurement is used for each competition or tender, even those part of a group of procurement procedures (lot), as long as for each procedure a separate competition (competitor, object, contractor, special contract) is held. As a consequence, the number of procurement procedures from government institutions’ evidence may differ from the number of procurements in this database. This is done aiming to have a detailed monitoring for each contract.

Donor: National Endowment for Democracy