Public officers receive training on procurement

The Public Procurement Authority (PPA) has began its training programme on Sustainable Public Procurement for all entities towards creating an efficient and effective public sector procurement system that is beneficial to the public.

The training, which began, on Monday, forms part of the PPA and Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) project.

The Confederation of Switzerland is supporting the three-year project with a counterpart grant of about 2.7 million dollars.

The programme would help address environmental, social and economic consequences of public procurement actions, among other objectives.

It is also in support of the Government’s interest to drive sustainable development with an overall objective of entrenching the principles of transparency, accountability and sustainability into the public procurement system.

About 90 participants from the various public sector institutions in the Greater Accra Region are attending the week-long training.

Mr Samuel Salas-Mensah, Chief Executive Officer of the Public Procurement Authority, said the training marked the final stages of the PPA-SECO SPP project.

Earlier deliveries include the establishment of a Task Force and proposals for amendments to the legal framework to integrate sustainability into the public procurement system.

Again, Mr Salas Mensah said the SPP Policy had been drafted, while training Modules for Monitoring and Evaluation had also been developed.

He said the training programme would, therefore, handle areas such as the identification of sustainability issues that were of importance to Ghana’s Sustainable Development.

Mr Salas-Mensah said issues like waste management, poverty reduction, and uneconomic use of resources, such as stationary in public institutions, were some of the obvious challenges facing the public sector.

He said sustainable procurement would, therefore, address these challenges and minimize public sector wastage to the minimum.

Mr Sebastian Jerry Ackotia, SPP Project Coordinator, said it was expected that the training, which would be expanded to all the other regions, would empower both public and private sector institutions to factor into their programmes and operations sustainable procurement to reduce wastage.

This, he said, would ensure efficient use of resources, value for money, and enforcement of laws, including environmental sanitation rules for sustainable national development.