ProZorro: Ukraine's Key Weapon to Fight Corruption

Ukraine's Public Procurement sector has been considered to be one of the most corrupt in the country. An estimated USD $2 billion was lost every year in corrupt schemes connected to the sector. Since launching in March 2014, the Prozorro, open source system initiative, has saved Ukraine nearly USD $55 million. That’s according to Maxym Nefedov, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister for Economic Development and Trade, Ukraine will save UAH 50 billion in 2017 alone because of Prozorro.

Thanks to Ukraine's anti-corruption drive, and the results the Prozorro initiative has provided, Ukraine officially joined the WTO Government Procurement Agreement and was recently awarded the ‘Open Government Partnership Award’ at the OGP Global Summit in Paris.

The Prozorro system is unique in the world and serves as a platform for cooperation between government, business, and civil society. Oleksandr Starodubtsev, Head of the Public Procurement Regulation Department says his team hopes that the system will become simple for analysis so that every person can check it: “Our citizens will demonstrate more interest and won’t wait for the President or the Prime Minister to come and solve all the problems.”

Olexa Shalaisky, Editor-in-Chief of ‘Nashi Groshi’ says the expectations of this system are high: “First it eliminates the corruption aspect of the disqualification of participants.... Secondly, the corruption scheme of preparing tenders and writing terms for a special participant is also eliminated by this system.”

However, according to some experts, Prozorro doesn’t solve all the problems and should only be seen as one of several instruments in Ukraine's toolbox in fighting corruption. “Prozorro isn’t a solution. It’s a good tool for those who don’t want to steal,” says Yuriy Nikolov, a journalist at ‘Nashi Groshi.'

Transparency International in Ukraine, which initially developed Prozorro and later transferred it to the government, also has its critiques: “We are here reforming public procurement in general, not only this small part of e-procurement...It’s only a tool for communication,” says the organization’s program director Viktor Nestulia.

“Prozorro helps to find corrupt practices,” says Nestulia adding that “it doesn’t help to enforce it and it doesn’t help to imprison everyone.” Transparency International has set up a monitoring platform—Dozorro—for the public to leave feedback and to point at corruption.

Hromadske’s Nataliya Gumenyuk spoke to Viktor Nestulia, Program Director at Transparency International Ukraine during live broadcast of The Sunday Show on December 11th, 2016 in Kyiv