Public Procurement Risk Trends 2021

Public procurement has become a major site of corruption in South Africa. Corruption Watch’s 2021 Analysis of Corruption Trends shows that procurement corruption was, alongside maladministration, the most common type of corruption reported in the first half of 2021.

Public procurement is, however, a highly technical area of public administration, subject to detailed and elaborate legal rules. When a procurement transaction does not follow the normal path, it is not always easy to determine whether it is a legitimate deviation, simply poor administration or indeed corruption.

Corruption Watch’s project, Procurement Watch, aims to improve civil society’s ability to monitor public procurement and to analyse red flags in public procurement that may point to malfeasance. CW will launch the first Procurement Watch Report on Procurement Risk Trends and introduce a new data analytics tool in a two-part webinar.