Honduras - Genr. Notes

[MariaArnalCanudo]

@rdoino-wb We will be using this issue to track the documentation and general questions on Croatia. We will open another issue named "Honduras-descriptive/analysis/etc" as we move forward

[MariaArnalCanudo]

Documentation:

• Especial section on the portal: Emergency COVID19
• Same porta above includes a couple of sections of tracking dashboards (Observatorio regional....). The dashboards are built with Tableau and some graphs present purchases before and after COVID at product level
• WHO data on COVID, cases reported, etc. Not related with procurement, but maybe worth to trends of vaccination or infections with trends in the purchases

Questions:

• @rdoino-wb we are sure we have procurement data, firm registry data and payment data from 2005 to 2021, right?
• This website includes several norms and reforms regarding COVID. Indeed, there are "Acuerdos" for a cap in the prices of masks, participation of SMEs and 2 more more on finance and ONCAE commissions. @rdoino-wb it might be worth to explore if we can identify the prices and suppliers of mask and gel before and during COVID. Once we have a list of products we can explore the norms and laws in detail from this website.
• There is an electronic catalog for purchases for COVID19 on the portal. @rdoino-wb could you double check whether we could use that data? It seems in your report for the Honduras project there is a drop in the number of projects during the COVID years. Electronic catalogs are usually linked to framework agreements, but not other procurement methods.
• Report from IDB on post COVID and economic recover. Here more plans on economic recovery.

Next tasks @rdoino-wb:

• [x] If "covid products" are identified in the data, list products, number of entities that purchase these products.
• [x] Check whether we could use the data from the portal

[rdoino-wb]

Answers

• We have procurement data from 2005 to 2021; we are requesting firm registry data with Thiago for the sub-sample of tenders that have been awarded, that have a reference to a supplier and that occurred from 2011 to 2019: if we want to use this data also for the COVID project, then it means that we need to talk to Thiago; I have never properly looked at the payment data so I can't tell you about the available period, and unfortunately the world bank run e-procurement platform has not been working for the last two weeks which prevents me from getting those data (you can check if it works for you: e-platfrom).
• I like the idea! I will try to see what we can do for the "before covid" using the standard procurement data. I have the feeling we will use the covid data from the covid emergency platform for the covid times and the standard procurement data from ONCAE.
• I have the same issue here. I can't get access to the platform. However, I have the direct source for the electronic catalog from ONCAE. I have never worked with this data, so It will take me time to explore them.
• Great!

[MariaArnalCanudo]

Other resources (source: RICG)

• It seems there was a FA on Medical equipment Surgical
• Regulatory Framework: Cancellation or Suspension of the purchases that are not related to the emergency and flexibility for the making purchases that are related to the emergency
• Transparency. Follow-up through teleworking for compliance with the restrictions the framework of the emergency, informing to the highest authority of the institutions and organizations monitor non-compliance.
• Integrity. Contributing in providing guidelines bearing unit help desk to support queries that have institutions.
• Innovation. Monitoring through teleworking, maintaining computer systems available and human resources in activity to support the processes of institutional purchase.

[rdoino-wb]

• Covid-emergency: I tried to match data from the covid-emergency portal with the e-procurement system and could not find a systematic way to do it: IDs are all completely different. Then, I tried to do manual matches, and the data we have on the covid-emergency portal is not in the standard outlet. However, this needs to be double-checked with our focal point for Honduras since I did a random check with 10 contracts/tenders.

• E-procurement: the issue here is that 379 contracts have “covid-19” in their subject. I did the same check, so I looked for these contracts in the emergency portal and could not find any. Yet, this is also something we should ask.

• Number of bidders: In the e-procurement system, the median of bidders per tender is 2, while in the emergency portal, only 1.2% of tenders had two bids, whereas the rest 98.8% had only one offer. Is it feasible?

• Indicators: we have all the necessary variables to construct all the indicators listed on GitHub. The only problem might be the number of bidders if this information is unreliable.

• Payment data: we have access to payment data for covid emergency and ordinary contracts.

[rdoino-wb]

ANSWER BY @serenacocciolo

• covid emergency: it could be that there is no overlap between the covid emergency portal and the e-procurement system. but i agree, we should double check with the focal points for honduras

• e-procurement: i am not surprised that some covid purchases ended up in the e-procurement system. it can be because they were not tagged as covid purchases (i imagine that contracts goes in the covid portal if they are manually are tagged as "covid"). we should check!

• number of biddes: for covid, yes, i am not surprised because i imagine there has been a lot (or maybe almost everything) of direct contracting. for the standard procurement, 2 is a bit low. we should ask about the number of bidders, yes. in our next meeting, we can also discuss more in details on this, so you can tell us more how you have already investigated this variable with thiago.