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.
Publisher
U