Colombia, France, Mexico, United Kingdom, and Ukraine officially launched the Contracting 5 (C5) initiative during the OGP Paris Summit in December.
Formalised in May 2016 at the Anti Corruption Global Summit in the UK, C5 aims at fighting corruption in public procurement, qualifying by the initiative as being the risk number one in government corruption.
The initiative wants to create “a group of governments working to foster openness, innovation, integrity and better business and civic engagement in government contracting and procurement”, the draft declaration stated.
“Procurement and contracting are critical to effective and responsive government; the use of a common reference framework at an international level guarantees the interoperability of data, encourages their re-use and allows government to benefit from a single structure for information on public procurement and have a better visibility on the public procurement policy in order to improve government efficiency”, it is also explained.
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Those five governments agreed to collaborate on:
- implementing the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS – defined by the Open Contracting Partnership) “to the fullest extent possible to create a timely”;
- support open source components; and
- “ensure that their knowledge and experience of implementing OCDS and other standards will benefit not only the C5 group but other countries embarking on open contracting”.
- Building a world alliance to “engage other countries” in Open Contracting is also mentioned.
During the OGP Paris Summit, a French version of the OCDS standard was also launched as the Open Contracting website stated.