Transparency and Integrity in Public Procurement: Global Trends, Emerging Challenges and Lessons Learned

It turns green, I believe, if it's on. Okay, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. We are not so many in the room, but I know that there are very many people online. And I'd like to welcome you all very much to this event on transparency and integrity in public procurement. global trends, emerging challenges, and country lessons learned. My name is Sarah Lister. I co-direct UNDP's work on governance, rule of law, and peacebuilding, and it's my great pleasure to guide you for the next couple of hours through our agenda together. So welcome again to Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. We are pleased, as I said, to have many people registered virtually, including representatives of member states, the UN system, civil society, academia, and other partners. So let me begin by expressing our sincere appreciation to our co-organizers, the Oversight and Anti-Corruption Authority, Nazzaha, of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the National Anti-Corruption Authority of Italy. Thanks to them for co-organizing this event and for their continued partnership. and for them sharing with us their experiences and good practices in strengthening integrity in public procurement. We have three distinguished speakers for the opening and then an engaging panel discussion and some response from partners. So we have a busy morning. And as chair, let me take this opportunity just to briefly set the stage for the conversation that we are going to have today. Why does procurement integrity matter? What is it that we are talking about? Public procurement is a core government function involving enormous public resources and translating those resources into essential services and infrastructure, from schools and hospitals to roads, energies and digital infrastructure. Globally, procurement is estimated to represent 13 to 20% of GDP, while across OECD countries it accounts for 30% of total government expenditure. Its scale also makes procurement particularly vulnerable to corruption and other integrity risks. Estimates cited by the World Bank suggest that 10 to 25% of the value of a public contract may be lost to corruption. So strengthening procurement integrity is not just a simply a technical issue. It is fundamental to effective governance, public trust and sustainable development. However, for many years, our understanding of corruption has relied heavily on perception based measures. These are important, but they don't always show policymakers where vulnerabilities lie or what can be done about them. And that is why UNDP working with governments and partners are complementing existing approaches with objective, data-driven, and actionable evidence. And with increasingly digital procurement systems, administrative data provides an important opportunity to identify patterns and potential integrity risks. Through the Global Initiative on Measuring Corruption, with the support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in partnership with the Government Transparency Institute, UNDP has analyzed procurement data from 59 countries and more than 70 million contracts. And that analysis offers us an important lesson. Data can make integrity risks more visible and actionable, but measurement is a means and not an end. Evidence must be understood in its national context, and most importantly, translated into better decisions and reforms. Our ambition is therefore to build a stronger bridge between global evidence and country-level action, helping countries use data to identify practical reform opportunities, strengthen national capacity, and learn from one another. So ultimately, success is not about how much data we produce, but whether that evidence helps build more transparent, competitive, and effective procurement systems and better public services. So today's discussion is an opportunity to hear those global findings alongside country experiences and together consider how we can turn better evidence into meaningful and sustainable reform. With that, let me welcome warmly our good friend and supporter in this endeavor, His Excellency, the Vice President of the Oversight and Anti-Corruption Authority, Nazzaha, of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Dr. Bandar Abalhal, to deliver the opening remarks. Your Excellency.

Good morning, Excellencies, distinguished representatives, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure joining you at this high-level side event and speaking alongside fellow colleagues on today's topic. I would like to express our appreciation to UNDP for convening us here today and their hard work and dedication that they have put into this global initiative, which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been proud to support. We meet on a subject that reaches into every household. Public procurement accounts for roughly one third of government expenditure worldwide. That equivalent of between 13 and 20% of GDP in many countries. Corrupt practices cause a lack of trust between citizens and governments. which raises public concern about whether public funds are allocated to what they are meant for. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, combating corruption and safeguarding the integrity of public resources has been a firm commitment. We recognize that this fight cannot be won by one actor alone. The Kingdom has therefore continued to work with domestic and international partners to strengthen transparency and accountability in all sectors of government, including public procurement. At the international front, the collective effort has delivered concrete results, including the foundational Vienna Principles the New York recommendations, and two resolutions adopted at the 10th and 11th conferences of the state parties to the United Nation Convention Against Corruption. Our support for the work being presented today is built on that commitment and on our conviction that procurement reforms must be grounded in evidence rather than assumptions. The analysis before us draws on the procurement data from 57 countries covering the period from 2017 to 2024. Evidence at that scale allows government to see where risk actually exists. At A point that deserves more attention is that countries should not be ashamed to publish their assessments. For too long, the international conversation on corruption has rested on indices and perception-based ranking that offer limited practical value for assessing a country's progress in combating corruption. An alternative would be to utilize objective data-driven tools. such as those developed by the UNDP and the Global Program on Measuring Corruption under the International Anti-Corruption Academy that point to specific weaknesses in systems. As a result, that exposes our weaknesses is not an admission of failure. It's a start of remedy that will help us overcome corruption challenges both domestically and internationally. Ladies and gentlemen, we are looking forward to sharing our own national experience in today's discussion and to learning from the countries' cases and perspective that our partners will bring. Good practice travels quickly when we take the time to examine it honestly. I look forward to a rich exchange and to practical way forward, forwarded can help chart for transparent, accountable and effective procurement system. Thank you. Thank.

You so much. You're up. Sorry. Thank you so much, Your Excellency, for those comments and for highlighting not just the importance of the issue, but for emphasizing also the process by which Member States can learn from each other. if they are open about the evidence and the data that they have. And thank you so much to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for setting the example in that yourselves, alongside the support that you have given to the broader anti-corruption and integrity ecosystem in the international domain. So we will pass now also to opening remarks from our other co-host. We will pass online to Dr. Giuseppe Busia, President of the International, I beg your pardon, of the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority of Italy. Dr. Busia, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you very much, Excellencies, distinguished participants, dear colleagues. I apologize very much for not having the possibility to participate in person, but it's really a great honor for the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority to co-host this event organized by UNDP alongside NADAA of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and we thank very much like UNDP for this opportunity. As we all know, public procurement is where public trust is tested most directly. Indeed, a huge part of public spending worldwide has been recorded pass throughout procurement system. And they, in fact, the essential infrastructure, the everyday infrastructure of the social contract between a state and its citizen. When that spending is transparent, competitive, and accountable, it becomes one of the most powerful tools we have to prevent corruption, to deliver better value for public funds and to strengthen citizen trust, making them know that institutions do their best to serve the people. When, on the contrary, the spending is not fair, the damage is rarely confined to the single public procurement procedure. It erodes confidence in public institution as a whole. It discourages honest firms from competing, and ultimately it costs society far more than the money involved in a single contract. In this sense, accountability is not a constraint on efficient government. It is a precondition for it. This is why data, digitalization, and evidence-based measurement sits at the very center of our authority's mandate. This is why we consider this exercise a part of something larger. Transparency alone, without the analytical capacity to make sense of what is disclosed, produce volume of information and data without insight. What is changing the nature of procurement oversight in Italy is not simply the publication of data, but the ability to turn the data into indicators and to gather, for example, patterns of single bidding, unusually short publication periods, concentration on a world among narrow sets of supply. And all these elements allow us to identify where the structural condition of corruption or the risk of it are most likely to be present and to act before harm is done rather than after the fact. And Italy has invested for over a decade in digital infrastructure that makes this kind of evidence-based oversight possible. Instead, we have created our national procurement database also before 2010, and we progressively open to public scrutiny. through which we now manage the entire digital life cycle of every public contract in the country. And I mentioned that not only as a technical detail, but something on last few days ago, on 9th of September, the European Commission presented a proposal for a new public procurement act. which would require to all member states of Europe to build a national procurement data space and require the establishment of database risk analysis tool and require government to assess and to publish the result of their own procurement system every year. And so Italy's system, of course, was not built to anticipate this proposal, but in this moment, we can say that it described precisely the direction in which all Europe is going. And the conviction that measurement only work if it is sustained, comparable and also honestly reporting using objective indicator. And this is what brought corruption measurement to be the center of Italy G20 presidency in 2021. In this occasion, indeed, we made it one of the anti-corruption working group flagship priorities. and ANAC together with the OECD and Italy's National Statistic Institute produced the first compendium of good practices on corruption measurement. In Italy, ANAC had contributed the work in the context of the 20 and on UN, UNODC initiative to support global effort to design better measure related to public procurement and anti-corruption and to foster transparency and integrity in public procurement in data-driven policy in this field. Italy and ANAC continue this work and I want to mention the Vienna principle that has been recalled. We participate on these other sites with of course, UNDP, and we see that today initiative and this partnership with UNDP and the Government Transparency Institute, we think is a direct, we can say, continuation of that ambition to make corruption measurement not a national exercise conducted in isolation, but a genuine, comparable, globally coordinated body of evidence. We are convinced that no national authority hold a monopoly on good practice. And the indicator grow more powerful if more countries contribute with their own data and their own experience. In today's workshop, Italy's partnership with NATAHA and our continued cooperation with UNDP Across of all this forum reflects exactly this underlying convention. Measurement can stronger only if more institution decide to invest together and to make information, data and knowledge, in this case related to public procurement, available to policy makers, to researcher, to civil society and ultimately to citizens. Let me close with a thing that I consider a central lesson of all this war, in whichever forum it takes place. Mentioning integrity risk is an act of responsibility. It gives policymakers, auditors, and citizens themselves the tools to ask better questions and to design reform that are proportionate to evidence rather than to perception alone. For this reason, I really want to thank again UNDP, the Government Transparency Institute, and our Saudi Arabia, for this occasion to work together to reinforce our common effort in reinforcing transparency and integrity in public procurement, and throughout that, in reinforcing all our institution. This is our common objectives, and this is our renewed commitment. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Dr. Bussia, for outlining the priorities of the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority in this regard, and how it links to broader priorities within Europe and within other intergovernmental and multilateral mechanisms. I also very much appreciated your framing in terms of the centrality of integrity and procurement integrity within the social contract, how central it is to trust between people and governments. And we are delighted that later in this program, we will be hearing both from the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority and Nazaha in relation to their own country experiences. with the data. And I think, as you mentioned, also the importance of linking the data then to indicators, to actionable indicators, to enable policymakers to address risks and other vulnerabilities that might be shown by the data. So we move now to our final opening remarks from Xiaohong Li, who is the representative in New York of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Xiaohong, over to you.

Thank you, Sarah, for giving me the floor. Can you hear me? Okay, thank you. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, dear colleagues, good morning. At the outset, I would like to thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Italy, and UNDP for organizing this discussion and all member states participating today. So as the previous speakers stated and the moderators also mentioned, public procurement is one of the largest areas of government expenditures. and involves direct interaction between public authorities and businesses, so it is therefore particularly exposed to corruption risks. With 192 states parties, the United Nations Convention against Corruption provides a comprehensive and legally binding framework to prevent and combat corruption. Article 9 of the Convention requires states parties to take the necessary steps to establish appropriate procurement system based on transparency, competition, and objective criteria in decision making, including an effective system of domestic review and appeal. So these principles remain unchanged, even as the technologies, um, rapidly transforms public procurement. Digital systems can help analyze bidding patterns, comparing prices and monitor contracts, but they do not eliminate corruption risks by themselves. Reliable and accountable decisions still depend on complete data, transparent criteria and sound procurement process. processes, sorry. The practical needs are clear. Procurement officials need information that helps them make better purchasing decisions. Auditors and anti-corruption bodies need to identify transactions that require closer examination. Businesses and civil society need access to information so that they can scrutinize public spending and raise concerns. Government, therefore, need to choose technologies that meet these needs and ensure that their institutions can use them effectively. This requires decisions on data quality, staff skills, institutional responsibilities and the resources needed to maintain the systems. So to help make these decisions, UNODC developed the non-binding guidelines on the adoption and the use of technologies to combat corruption in public procurement. The guidelines set out principles that states can adapt to their legal systems, institutional capacities, and also levels of digital development. As also mentioned by other speakers, multi-stakeholder approach and international cooperation is essential to advance integrity in public procurement. So UNODC provides technical assistance through the regional anti-corruption platforms, and also with its implementing partner, the Open Contracting Partnership. We also assist the states in implementing procurement legislation, improving electronic procurement systems, and publishing reliable data using the Open Contracting data standard. We also support measures to strengthen beneficial ownership, transparency, procurement, audits, and complaint procedures. In 2025, this cooperation supported at least 32 public institutions and 31 civil societies in 11 countries. and also national partners also supported the trainings to thousands of public officials. In the first half of 2026, UNODC together with its implementing partners supported 19 public institutions and 11 civil society and private sector organizations in 11 countries. Today's analysis can help guide this work. Comparing experience across procurement system can help states identify priorities for reform and development partners determine where technical assistance is most needed. So we look forward to discussing these findings and also continuing the cooperation with UNDP, member states and other partners. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you very much, Xiaohong, for outlining UNODC's extremely central and important role in this broader space on anti-corruption and procurement integrity and measurement. issues. We do so appreciate at UNDP the partnership that we have at all different levels, country, regional, global with UNODC, and we look forward to working further on these critical issues together. I do understand that you have to leave us. That is totally understood in these very, very busy days in New York, but we know that your UNODC colleagues are with us here in the room and can contribute further to the conversation. So that brings us to the end of our opening remarks, and we're going to move to the panel discussion now. We have four presentations from experts, and I would ask all of them, we are running a little bit behind time, to keep to time or even reduce very slightly the length of time that they were given. And we are going to start with my colleague, Mr. Anga Timilsina, the Global Anti-Corruption Advisor from UNDP, who going to present the preliminary findings from the global analysis of the 2017 to 2024 public procurement data from 57 countries, which we have been talking about already. Anga, over to you.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Sarah, excellencies, distinguished panelists and participants. On behalf of UNDP and the Government Transparency Institute, GTI, It's my great pleasure to present here some global insights from our global analysis of data and indicators designed to measure transparency and integrity in public procurement. In my presentation, I will first give some background on our global initiative, followed by overview of methodology and data, then I will shown into those measured observation and findings from our preliminary analysis of our global data. Next slide, please. We launched our global initiative on measuring corruption in Atlanta in December 2023 during the conference of the state parties to UNCAC. We had two objectives in mind. First, can we bring our global community together to harmonize where possible to standardize these methodologies and so on, because there is so much fragmentation going on in terms of anti-corruption or corruption measurement. Then we started our global conferences on corruption measurement, and last year's was a very successful one with more than 500 participants, more than 100 countries, 22 institutions, and it was right here in New York, and hopefully we'll have one next year. Then the second question was, can we develop more robust, evidence-based, comparable, and actionable data and indicators? As Sarah already alluded on perception-based indicators, they're great for advocacy. But when you want to really look at gaps, whether institutionals and so on, we really need some actionable data and also comparable data. So I will not go into detail what we do. We have produced three methodologies, two set of indicators, and we are also exploring additional areas with partners. But now, next slide, turning into our methodology. This has been, of course, a very intensive but highly rewarding experience. We had the advisory committee of experts for from almost 20 institutions and member states, and we even presented this methodology to G20 working group last year, and also the IRG, the Implementation Review Working Group. Now we are conducting almost 40, 50 consultations with member states and Also, gaining a much better understanding of different national context, and we are taking into account those comments from the member states when we are doing the second revision of our website. But turning to our methodology, next slide, we have seen methodologies, many methodologies out there from measuring perception to legal assessment to institutional capacity and even audit systems. But ours, we think that it's objective red flag methodology, drawing on actual procurement data published through government open data sources as mentioned by our distinguished speakers from Italy earlier. And we are looking into these five indicators and they are non-open procedures, lack of tender publication, single bidding, tax haven suppliers, and contract modification. The reason why we picked those five indicators is because we can measure at least majority of them for at least 64 countries. And two, they also actually represent all these three phases of public procurement, the design phase, the award phase, and the implementation phase, so that it's a bit of comprehensive you know, approach to track all these red flags. Of course, our country studies are looking into more red flags, so more can be done at the country level. But globally, if we have to put together 64, 65 countries, so these five indicators are based on the availability of data on the one hand. On the other hand, we also have some evidence and backing of literature that these are the key transparency and integrity risk indicators. Next slide. Yeah, I mean, they come from the public sources. I already mentioned that. And of course, we wanted to have at least, let's say, 130, 40 countries. But in our initial analysis, we can only collect data for 64 countries. It's partly because of cost. It's also partly because of the availability of data. And we do not have up-to-date e-procurement system in many countries and open data standards as well. But we are also mapping information for 98 countries where we were not able to develop these indicators to actually give a comprehensive picture of why. That will also lead into more data dialogue and so on. Now going into this data collection and processing, I don't want to go into detail, so we have the methods note. Next slide, please. So now, in terms of global coverage, we do have some interesting overall reading in terms of overall progress. Global norms and standard have strengthened procurement integrity overall, whether it's the Article 9 of UNCAC or open the data standards, and also the OECD assessment and some other instruments assessment as well. And technology combined with open contracting have made it easier to identify risk early on and address systemic inefficiency. and data availability is also improving in many countries because they are also improving e-procurement processes during last 10 years. However, as I mentioned earlier, we still have data accessibility issue, the completeness issue, quality vary significantly across countries. So, and the institutionalization of red flag approach is still remain uneven. So we have only a handful of anti-corruption agencies or procurement authorities using red flag approach to systematically monitor these risks. Now on emerging global insights, next slide, and next slide. Well, as Sarah already mentioned in her opening remarks, that this is, we think, a groundbreaking initiative. Why? Because we have covered 74 million contracts from 2017 to now. We are even updating until 2025. And that represents almost 36 trillion in spending in terms of purchasing power parity. which is around 10% of GDP in OECD countries and 8% of GDP overall in those 59 countries we have. And second, looking at the distribution of contracts. and value, most contracts in our data set are relatively low value contracts, which is also reservation from many memory states. But when we look at the total spending, a relatively small number of high value contracts account for the bulk of overall spending, by the way. In numbers, we have smaller contracts, but in terms of spending, we have those bigger contracts actually covering the overall spending. And then, Next slide. When we look at the integrity risk, I mean at least the availability of data by distribution, by sectors, obviously construction is the largest share of procurement value globally, followed by medical equipment, business service, IT service, and healthcare. So I mean construction is the big area for public procurement. And when you look, when we look at the integrity and corruption risk over time, we see little to no change between 2017 to 2014. It might got worse globally during the COVID-19. So we know why. You know, I will show you health is the one of the, I mean, the largest risky area there. But that underlining dynamics is not different from what we have observed stagnation in terms of governance reform. and anti-corruption reform in many countries. So the procurement integrity goes, I think, goes side by side with the stagnation overall on anti-corruption reform and so on. If we look at just the perception index as well, we see there is no change in 135 countries during last 12 years. So the global average is 43. So that same goes with our procurement assessment. Only two countries have shown significant progress. with more than 10 data points. And we see three countries' situation deteriorating. Other than that, overall, there is stagnation. And next slide. Average integrity score by indicators. This is also interesting because we see 29% of public contracts are awarded through non-open procedure, which is like a 3 in 10. And same goes with 3 in 10 receive only a single bid. So these findings also warrant more detailed country level analysis, so because These patterns may be signs of integrity violation, such as bribery, bid rigging, and cronyism. At the same time, they may also reflect concentrated suppliers market, limited procurement capacity, or legal provision that permit non-competitive methods for certain type of processes. So that's why the country analysis is really important, and we are glad that Italy and Saudi Arabia are presenting their country detailed case studies today. So, next slide. Looking at the average integrity score by group of countries, it's also interesting. Being a member of OECD pays off there, compared to non-OECD. I don't know, maybe because of the OECD convention and they have the review and public procurement and those indicators and their methodology called MAPS. Then G20 and non-G20, you know, but I don't want to make big out of this because you also see many outliers on the right-hand side that they are also dragging the overall average. So that's why the detailed country case studies should follow after our, you know, data dashboard and indicators. So this is an interesting country comparison as well. Next slide, please. And we have also validated our integrity risk score through correlation analysis, and it goes without saying that lower procurement risk are associated with lower perceived level of corruption, high income, high human development, just like other governance indicators. Now, regarding contract size, red flags are slightly more common among low value contracts than among high value contracts, although the difference is only a few percentage point. So it's not really significant difference, but the low value contract, because they have low intensity for audit, so they are also likely to have corruption or bribery risk and so on. And they are less competitive by nature, low value contracts in many countries. And then next slide, please. So, healthcare shows the highest prevalence of red flags, followed by IT services. We are also in discussion with our health team, and maybe also with the Global Fund and WHO to discuss this, how we can utilize our data and so on to improve integrity in the health sector. Next slide. And this one is very interesting. Our analysis of single bidding in larger construction contracts shows that risk can vary significantly both within and across countries. For example, in one country, I don't name it, in one country, most construction contracts worth more than USD $500,000 and it has only one bidder, meaning that this is particularly notable because the typical rate of single bidding in that country is 10%. compared to the global average of 20%. But when you look at the construction value with that, you know, more than 500,000, we have single readers. So looks like these are the kind of things needs to be further investigated in terms of red flags and risk. Yeah. Just two key observations here. We would like to invite memory states to help sustain this initiative and also to use our analysis and findings at the country level for anti-corruption reform. And finally, I don't want to, you know, pre-empt the recommendations. So, our recommendations are actually going to be organized in four pillars: open data and transparency, technology and data system, oversight and accountability, and procurement policy and process design. And we are also providing a table by each of these pillars and recommendation to each of these major stakeholders, from anti-corruption authority to, you know, nationally statistical offices, to international organization, private sector, academia, and also high-level policy makers like ministers and so on, the cabinet. So yeah, this will be coming, so we will launch our global report in next, uh, three, four months, the consultation is still going on with our member states, so we don't want to, you know, surprise anybody, we need more review and validation, so let me stop here, over.

Thank you very much, Anga. I was sorry to rush you there because there's fascinating data that we could have spent a long time going into. But thank you so much for sharing. I hadn't seen all of that, and I will certainly be looking again at some of that data that I hadn't seen before. We are going to pass now to Dr. Michaeli Fazekas, who is the scientific director and founder at the Government Transparency Institute. GTI, who is UNDP's partner for the initiative on measuring corruption and who has been collecting data. Today, Michael is presenting some key findings from the deep country case studies that they have conducted under our joint initiative on Italy and Saudi Arabia. Over to you, Dr. Fizecas.

Great. Thanks a lot, Sarah, and thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. And just like the other online speakers before me. I'm very sorry I cannot be there in person. I will try to stick to the eight minutes allocated so that we have enough time for discussions. And I will highlight a few interesting points from in-depth case studies for Italy and Saudi Arabia. And I literally just highlight a few points. I cannot cover these detailed studies in sufficient detail and depth in this little time. So what are we trying to do and what are we trying to achieve with these detailed case studies? So naturally, these country case studies represent a continuation of the global study and they build on the anti-corruption compass, the underlying data standard, the underlying data collection indicators. However, the objective of these country studies is to tailor the methodology to local context, data, policy needs, and other local requirements, and provide context-sensitive, specific policy advice using specific methods as well as indicators fitting the local needs. And these are really just two examples, but hopefully it will inspire some people around the table, and they see the value of such analysis such contact specific analysis. So let's start with Italy very quickly. We grabbed the data from ANAC, the Italian anti-corruption agencies, authorities, open data portal, which is a great portal because it publishes data in a machine readable bulk. downloadable format, so we're grateful for that. We cover a long time period here, going back to 2011, covering 2025, and you could see that the amount of data varies from year to year, but we have more than 100,000 contracts for most of the years. The red flags list is very similar to what Anga has mentioned, so we have single bidding, as also as Dr. Buzio mentioned, so the single bidding procedure types, open procedure types. But we also have a couple of indicators such as Benford's law or distinct market indicator, which compares the number of different markets a supplier is present compared to its size. Of course, if a company is very small and it is selling everything from healthcare products to cleaning services to cars, that's Sort of odd, not impossible, but the chances are that companies using its connections rather than really being good and specializing all these different markets. So we pull together these indicators into a simple average. If you like, we have a rather steady amount of red flags in Italy. going up onto the COVID pandemic 2020, after which there is a slight increase and only very recently in 2025, you see the decline of those red flags. Now, what made the Italian study specific and unique is that we heavily relied on network studies, network methods, but you have see here, Sicily and Lombardy, two provinces in Italy, very look at the networks of municipalities as they are linked by shared suppliers. And shared suppliers were of particular interest in this study because we wanted to look at how the composition of suppliers changes on the municipal level when the local mayor's party, when the mayor changes around elections. And so what we have been doing, we looked at sort of normal turnover in suppliers in each of the municipalities in Italy in this long period of time. So when there is no elections and we compared that to turnover, the change in the composition of suppliers when mayor changes. What we see here is that there is quite some variation. Most municipalities actually don't show if you like a risky patterns, but some, and these are the red ones on the map. you see that is map on the right hand side. So these are the municipalities where we see a suspiciously large dissimilarity, so large change in the composition of suppliers when the mayor changes compared to normal years when there is no elections. So this is no evidence of any wrongdoing, but if you bring that together with red flags and this politically driven turnover in supplier composition, you start to ask questions whether there is sort of local capture, so local dominance of local political business ties and Italy is the country which has had good public procurement and company and political data for a long time, so we do have quite a bit of studies underpinning the idea that local politics in some parts of Italy is heavily influenced by political connections of suppliers and mafia in some places even. So this is super interesting and we try to offer some insights on what public procurement data can add to this. We also produce a number of specific policy recommendations around data, around improving public procurement regulations, enhancing the already existing and very good dashboards with red flags run by ANAC and a couple of others. So really context-specific recommendations and data-driven ideas. Saudi Arabia is another one, it's rather different. The context is different, the data is different. We have scraped Ethimat portals, public procurement data. There is no open data, one-click bulk download option. So this is one thing which Saudi Arabia can improve on compared to Italy, for example. Yet the data is open in many respects, so this is great news. for data analytics and we have a great number of contracts, but an order of magnitude lower number of contracts in Saudi Arabia than Italy. So we have like 40,000, 30,000 contracts a year in this 2021-25 time period. The list of red flags, again, tested, validity tested and tailored to the local context. is similar to Italy, although under the hood, the specific details of course differ. We have a broader set of red flags in the global study, but not yet as broad as in Italy, and that's largely driven by data availability. Still, we can pull these indicators together, single bidding, non-open procedure types, spend force flow, and others. into a composite score. And one thing which we have done in Saudi Arabia together with Nazaha is that we drawn up a list of high risk buyers. And you see here the distribution of buyers with at least 10 contracts in this period and their red flags. So you see a distribution that most entities are relatively low risk. So one, two red flags on average, which happens, no big cause for concern, and you have some buyers in the kingdom which have four out of eight red flags or 0.5 CRI score or even higher. And these are the ones which systematically contract in the presence of a lot of red flags. As Anga mentioned, as in explored with Nazar, some of these are justified because these buyers operate on very specialized, if you like, monopolistic markets, so one provider for technological or regulatory reason. But some of these buyers operate on otherwise competitive markets, and this is where you can start asking questions. The second thing which we looked at in the Saudi study, it was the impact of regulatory threshold. And this was again something which has been documented in other countries, such as in Sweden, for example, but also in other European countries, also in the US. And we find a familiar pattern that around the regulatory threshold about which more open contracting is required, under which more direct contracting, less open bidding is allowed. These thresholds mark a distinct drop in the amount of red flags. Above the thresholds, there is much less presence of red flags under the threshold. There is a lot more red flags. And what's very interesting, that there are some buyers who, if you like, game the contract values to go just under the threshold. So they have just a few dollar, a few yen, fewer, lower contract value than the threshold. So that's very interesting and it opens up the opportunity to ask questions about what's happening in this contract, what was the real reason behind this. Again, context-specific recommendations, some relate to the data infrastructure, such as publishing organization IDs, which is not present in the public data, but is present, for example, in Italy. So we know that this is something which the Kingdom could do. We also looked at some uses of the analytical insights. And again, the previous presentation from Anok highlighted this data is great foundation, indicators are useful, but what's very important is to embed these analytical tools such as dashboard indicator systems and other tools in the regular operations, investigations, in policy analysis, in the regular operations and really making them part of the day-to-day practice of these organizations. So let me conclude here, sorry I overran two minutes. So the case studies hopefully demonstrated how going beyond the global methodology delivers context-sensitive and actionable policy insights. The red flags can be deployed in a way that they support investigation as well as policy analysis. And this is a methodology which can be tailored to different third, fourth, fifth country needs and really bring the right methodology for the policy questions and the data constraints in the particular country. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Dr. Vasegas, for presenting that overview of the data from our two country cases that we're looking at today. Again, there was really fascinating data in there that we could delve into in much more detail, but we are now actually going to hear from the anti-corruption authorities in those countries how that data has helped them institute reform processes or how they're looking at that data, how they understand it. So first, we'll turn back to the oversight and anti-corruption authority, Naza, in Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Khalid Bouchaite, who's director of the G20 department at Naza, will talk to us about how Saudi Arabia is managing to implement key reforms to strengthen integrity and transparency in public procurement, how it's using that data and evidence to strengthen the public procurement and respond to the findings from the country case study. Over to you.

Thank you very much. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good day to you all.

Would like to first thank the UNDP for organizing this event and also thank the UNDP and GTI for all the hard work that they've been doing in this area when it comes to enhancing integrity in public procurement.

So today, I would like to share with you Saudi Arabia's experience in combating corruption in public procurement. And today I will cover the key reforms we have undertaken, how we are using data and digital tools to identify risks, some reflections and priorities, and how evidence can be turned into concrete action. So public procurement is one of the most significant points of interaction between government, the private sector, and public resources. This is why integrity here matters so much. It protects value for money, supports fair competition, strengthens public confidence, and ensures that government resources are directed toward their intended objectives. Integrity is the foundation of the entire procurement life cycle. It means clear and equal requirements so suppliers can compete fairly. It means accessible information so decisions can be scrutinized, and it means strong controls that reduce opportunities for misconduct. Together, these safeguards build trust in public institutions. Saudi Arabia has placed significant emphasis on digitalizing procurement. But from an integrity perspective, digitalization is not the end objective. The real opportunity is data it generates. Digital systems create a footprint. That footprint makes risks visible. Analytics give us foresight, and foresight enables timely action. This is our journey from digital procurement to intelligent governance. Saudi Arabia has undertaken a broad set of reforms to strengthen transparency, competition, and integrity throughout the procurement life cycle. This journey combines four elements that reinforce each other. A legal foundation sets the rules. Institutional oversight ensures accountability. Digital infrastructure, through the Etimad platform, strategizes processes and creates a traceable record. And fourth, data-driven governance shifts oversight towards proactive evidence-based action.

And now I will take us through each one of these.

The legal foundation is the Government Tenders and Procurement Law. It provides the regulatory basis for government procurement and establishes principles of transparency, competition, equal opportunity, and procedural integrity. It contributes to integrity in three particular ways. It standardizes procedures, it defines responsibilities, and it sets requirements for governing procurement activities and information. Importantly, these reforms are the institutional foundation on which digital digitalization and data-driven oversight can operate. Alongside the legal framework, Saudi Arabia has continued to strengthen its institutional mechanisms for preventing and combating corruption. Clear authorities and traceable decisions strengthen accountability, and today the availability of digital procurement data gives us these institutions. gives these institutions an additional capability, the ability to identify patterns and potential risks systematically across entities, suppliers, sectors, and periods. One of the most significant developments in the kingdom's procurement environment has been Ertamad. It supports the procurement life cycle from planning and tendering through bid submission, evaluation, and awarding. to contract management and related financial processes. The platform also gives visibility of future procurement plans, which helps the private sector understand upcoming government opportunities. And because every stage is digital, Ed2Med creates a comprehensive record of procurement activity. It is not only a procurement platform, but a foundation for evidence-based oversight. This matters because digital processes embed integrity into the process itself, rather than depending solely on later oversight. Procurement information becomes more accessible, so suppliers can participate on a more informed basis. Standardized workflows reduce the variations that come with manual processes, and with them, opportunities for discretionary or opaque practices. Decisions become traceable and oversight become continuous. Digital records also create a visible history of procurement decisions. Events are recorded in a consistent format and connected across planning, tendering, evaluation, award, and contract activity. This strengthens the ability of oversight bodies to reconstruct and assess what happened, which better context than before. And the findings from these reviews can then inform stronger controls and more effective future processes. Now, this brings me to data. Digitalization has fundamentally changed the information available about government purchasing. Tender characteristics, the number of participating suppliers and bids, estimated and awarded values, timelines, and repeated interactions between entities and suppliers from all form and suppliers all form the core evidence base. When we collect this information reliably, integrate it across entities, suppliers, and stages, and interpret it carefully, we can turn data into meaningful risk signals and oversight priorities. This allows us to move beyond reactive oversight. Traditionally, issues are examined only after complaints, inspections, or investigations. and manual review simply cannot examine every transaction with equal depth. Structured data changes this. Analytics can surface unusual patterns earlier so that limited oversight resources are focused on the activities that merit closer review. This creates an opportunity to complement traditional oversight mechanisms with continuous risk-based analysis. Saudi Arabia is increasingly exploring procurement indicators and analytical techniques to identify potential integrity risks, including those developed under the UNDP's Global Initiative for Corruption Measurement. These include single bid procurement and limited supplier participation, unusual bidder concentration, significant differences between estimated values and winning offers, repeated awards involving the same suppliers, and anomalies across entities, suppliers, or procurement categories. However, no individual indicator proves corruption. These indicators are most valuable when analyzed collectively rather than in isolation. For example, a single bid procurement on its own may not indicate any integrity concern, but a pattern involving repeated single bids, limited supplier participation, and unusual supplier concentration may warrant additional examination. Stronger insight comes from combining signals with context, and professional judgment then determines whether further action is warranted. We see the development of procurement analytics as a progression. At the descriptive level, we identify what has happened. Diagnostic analytics seeks to understand why particular patterns have occurred, and also seeks to identify where similar risks may emerge in the future. And the ultimate objective is to connect all these capabilities to risk-based intervention so that analysis leads to action. So how do we translate findings into concrete action? We follow an integrity cycle. Procurement data feeds risk indicators and analytical models. These help us identify higher risk activities and prioritize limited oversight resources. Prioritized risks then trigger contextual analysis and human review, which determines whether additional action is warranted. Finally, the results feed back into the cycle, so the systems keep learning and improving over time. To build these capabilities, Saudi Arabia is developing Rakeeb, which supports the identification and monitoring of potential fraud and corruption risks. Its value lies in its ability to analyze large volumes of procurement information, Put simply, HTMAD provides a digital procurement footprint, and this provides analytical capabilities that help transform that footprint into risk intelligence. Together, they allow procurement oversight to become increasingly continuous, proactive, and risk-based. In practice, advanced analytics would detect patterns that would be difficult to identify through manual review alone. Potential applications include unusual bidding behavior, supplier concentration, potential collusive patterns, and abnormal pricing relationships. But once again, these findings guide review. They are risk signals, not conclusions, and they do not replace professional judgment or establish investigative processes. This leads to our key reflections and priorities. The most important principle is the distinction between identifying risk and determining misconduct. A statistical or analytical red flag does not establish that corruption has occurred. Analytics should strengthen institutional decision making, not replace it. As AI plays a larger role, that requires practical principles around explainability, human oversight, bias management, and accountability. Looking ahead, our priorities are strengthening the quality and integration of procurement data, advancing our analytical capabilities, and ensuring that evidence is effectively translated into policy, preventative measures, and targeted actions. So to conclude, Saudi Arabia's experience reflects a broader commitment to integrity, transparency, and accountability as essential elements of effective governance and sustainable development. Our objective is to harness digital transformation to build public procurement systems that are more transparent, resilient, accountable, and trusted. Strengthening procurement integrity is a shared international priority. Partnerships with international organizations, including UNDP, provide an important platform for this exchange. And with this, I would like to reiterate what His Excellency mentioned in his opening remarks, and that is that Saudi Arabia remains committed to sharing its experience and learning from international practices. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Khalid, for that very clear exposition of moving from data to intelligent governance. and putting in place those capacities for proactive and anticipatory analysis of the data and then how you then move to to act on that um and I was fascinated by etimad and raki and I've written notes and I'd love a copy of your presentation actually because I thought it was such a a clear Exposition of what is possible and I particularly appreciated your remarks at the end around AI and as the capabilities of AI expand and the benefits and opportunities, how we build in those safeguards and that human oversight and the human in the loop aspects to ensure that we continue to work in terms of transparency and accountability. So now we're going to pass back to the case of Italy and the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority. And Dr. Giuseppe Abetino is going to present Italy's public procurement system and how it is using data and evidence to strengthen its integrity and to reflect on the findings from the country case study provided by GTI. Over to you, Dr. Abetino.

Thank you very much, Excellencies, Distinguished participants, their colleagues, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the stakeholders and promoters of these initiatives, our institutional partner in fact, UNDP and the INAZA, and particularly let me thank Mr. Angad Nussina, Mr. Risharai, and Ms. Niall Fazekas, but through them, I would like to thank the fantastic team of researchers and scholars at UNDP and at the Governance and Transparency Institute for the vital important work they are organizing and carrying forward. As mentioned by President Cruzilla, we in ANAC are honored to work with you in this another parallel initiative related to measuring corruption into the use of public procurement data and other sources to unlock the maximum value and knowledge from them. I'm happy also to share the today initiative with other low spending such as open contracting partnership and World Bank. The distinguished participants and institutional representatives and colleagues who spoke before me have already outlined the importance of in-depth studies on public procurement and their potential impact. So given the limited time available, I will not revisit these topics. Instead, I would like to that I can share how ANAC and more broadly Italy approach and support the measurement of corruption initiative and the use of public procurement data, of which the study by GTI and DP is the most recent expression, and how this engagement connects to the global processes many of you in this room in New York are connected remotely to work on directly. For over 15 years, it was mentioned, we at ANAC in general, in Italy, every Italian contracting authority has been legally required to report procurement data to the ANAC national database, the Banca Dati Nazionale dei Contratti Pubblici, as we used to call it, the BDNCP, that is basically the Italian public procurement register. And this is a central national infrastructure that collects procurement data and through which digital platforms concerning procurement exchange the lifecycle data end-to-end, from planning through work, execution, modification and completion. And also to the platform, it is possible to fulfill publication and transparency obligation automatically related to public procurement. for us, this is very important. It was mentioned also in the opening remarks by President Busia, the proposal of the European Commission of eight days ago. about a regulation on public contracts and concessions. And be able to say that, put simply, the direction Europe is now proposing is very close, as mentioned before, to the system Italy has already invested four years in building. And that is not for sure a case, because ANAC, due to its experience, have directly contributed to the European technical work on e-forms and on the underlying data ontology that this proposal now builds on and we are really very proud of it. But, as you know, as we all can share, data is nothing if it is not converted into knowledge. So, you can imagine that Every data and each stage of our procurement track by the DNTCP in Italy, the public procurement register in Italy, generates data that are not usable in itself, but that are usable to try to design, build and calculate indicator. Presently, you see I mentioned some example of this indicator. OK, you know, unusual short publication periods, limited participation, repeated single visit and so on. But for sure, as it was mentioned also by Dr. Fathekar, none of these signals were wrong doing in its own, but if we analyze in a broader perspective, these data and more precisely these indicators can tell us more. But let me explain better recording the Italian specific experience and the other specific experiences in this, because one clear illustration of this is a program that ANAC coordinated, a program co-financed by the European Union, bringing together Italian institutions and researchers to build 17 public procurement indicators using the data included in the mentioned VDNCP. We built this 17 public procurement indicators in a general, in a broader framework of 70 indicators related not only to public procurement, but also what we call context indicators, that is indicators related to labor market, economy at local level, citizen participation and so on. And we are very proud of this work because to put in connection risk indicator related to public procurement to other typology of measures to have a broader picture of the risk of corruption in our country, not only at national level, but also at a local level. And using this kind of data, I want to emphasize an aspect. All these data and indicators are not just available to ANAC for our oversight activities. All this data, also the one, the platform mentioned by Dr. Fazekas, and in general terms, all the platform that we manage, in this specific case, the platform with these risk indicators, are open and public and everything is published in the web portal equipped with self-service dashboards to tailor the analysis in a more personalized and customized way. So you can understand that we all share for sure that once those indicators are existed from our side, the supervisory attention could be focused on basis of specific evidence rather than only report the complaint that we receive from citizen for example, because in general, persistent structural pattern of risk across many contracts in the case of public procurement could be distinguished from isolated anomalies. And these can be normal in general terms in a system. And the GTI colleagues did exactly this kind of work using, in our case, as I described before, Italian public procurement data. And with their research, they developed also additional indicators and developed very interesting analysis, further analysis, such as the network analysis that was introduced. And all these additional indicators and analysis are very interesting from a scientific point of view, and we want to thank the colleagues at GTI and UNDP for this effort. So, imagine this digital platform, the availability of this data, not only for a supervised, for an authority, an institution, for performing oversight, but in general terms, used also by research centers and so on. All these pillars we imagine that can be included in the forthcoming European framework and we keep on work for it. But this effort that we at ANAC in Italy try to do at national level, we try to put the same fashion, we can say, also at international level. President Lucia mentioned all the initiatives that ANAC also tried to lead at international level. It was mentioned our, the Italian G20 presidency in 2021 to develop this compendium, not only to define corruption, to use the best practices at the international level in measure of corruption. We took part in the global conference on harnessing data to prove corruption measure, convened in Vienna by UNDP, IACA, UNCTAD, UNDP. We took part in the path to develop the global framework for the measurement of corruption that includes also indicators on public procurement, and we can mention a lot of other initiatives that also other panelists recall. And we see that as also underlined, because we see that the exercise we are part of today, together with UNDP and the GTI and their colleagues at the NASA, is a direct and practical continuation of that framework, that is comparable, validated indicators, applied first to five countries, Today we are presenting data in the case of Italy and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but with the exclusive intention of expanding this methodology further. So before concluding, I was asked also to present to you, to this community of institutional representatives and also practitioners, some take away some proposals, some consideration based on the Italian experience. So let me humbly propose some consideration to other countries considering a similar path to the one of Italy, and hopefully that they can draw inspiration from. Maybe the most important particular feature of the Italian system in this field is taking together the supervision of public procurement within the general system of prevention of corruption. You know that ANAC, the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority, is the central authority coordinating the Italian efforts and the definition of level in Italy to prevent corruption, to contract corruption, to measure corruption. But we also oversight and we issue second level regulation of public procurement. This is very important because the huge amount of funds at stake in public procurement is the mention related risk of corruption. So this is the first takeaway from our experience. Also because we can rely on high quality data, public for procurement data, they can be used for in general terms for the prevention of corruption. But as mentioned before, data is not enough. Nothing without something that, without tools to transform, to translate this data into knowledge, to avoid, as I used to say, the risk of bulimia of data, that is too much data, but anorexia of knowledge, you know? when you don't use properly this data to drive policies and initiatives. For this reason, data are not enough if you not build and define and calculate indicators. And the previous distinguished panelist talked about this. And in Italy, this data and these indicators are not used for, as I underlined before, not only for also for the institution, but also for civil society, for academia, for NGOs working in the fields, why not for data journalists, and ultimately also for citizens, because when we talk about It's corruption measure, but with the objective to prevent corruption and maladministration before this phenomenon can happen. It's not this work that just a single individual institution like in Italy, ANAC, can do by itself, but this is necessary the contribution of all the institutional system, of all the actors and stakeholders, also for civil society and citizens. So we need our collective efforts And this is what we, as a independent institution, try to do, for example, with our public procurement register that is publicly available and with our portal of risk indicators. Last point, last consideration, the importance we try for independent institution Maybe now we know very well our commitment with this kind of policies and practices within our country, but it is very important for us, this was part of our effort also to translate this effort at international level, to contribute as we have briefly described before, to international processes measuring corruption and using data to prevent corruption, to foster integrity. And we try to put this commitment, once again, this passion, not only at the national level, but at the international level. And for example, in initiatives like this global program and the today initiative and the other initiative that we mentioned before. So for this reason, once again, I would like and our study colleagues at NADA for the partnership behind this initiative. And we look forward to continuing to contribute to it and to the wider global framework on corruption measurement we are building together. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Dr. Albertino, for both laying out the Italian experience and talking about how the 17 indicators fit within a broader frame. but also highlighting Italy's commitment to broader international processes and contribution to intergovernmental processes and discussions on these issues, as well as for highlighting for us at the end that importance of engaging with the broader ecosystem. and ensuring that there is a collective effort. And we do value the partnership with you on this initiative and beyond. That brings us to the end of this very interesting panel session. We do have now an opportunity to hear some brief reflections from partners before I open up the floor. We have about 45 minutes left together, so we wanted to hear from some of our partners and then give those online and those in the room an opportunity to reflect, to contribute, to ask questions to any of the speakers. So we will move now to some reflections from Ms. Lindsay Marchesol, who is the Director of Impact and Innovation at the Open Contracting Partnership. And UNDP and OCP have an ongoing partnership to develop new methodologies to collect data on public procurement from countries that have limited data and digital infrastructure. So perhaps you could, as part of your intervention, outline also how this might be complementary with what we've been hearing today. Lindsay, over to you.

Most definitely. Thank you so much, Sarah, and thank you so much to the presenters so far for that you've shared with us today and your wonderful experiences from Italy and Saudi Arabia, as well to Nisi and Anga for sharing the methodological background of the UNDP Corruption Measurement Initiative. My name is Lindsay. I work with an organization called Open Contracting Partnership, and we're a nonprofit that works with partners around the world to reform their public procurement system. And we are partners with UNODC and UNDP in pursuing those goals. So we appreciate our partners for including us today. think I have, you know, three reflections to share based on the presentation so far and the work on the methodologies. That's something that I'll start with a point that was made already by Anga, by Khalid and others, by Mesi, that really you can't manage what you can't measure. And data is fundamentally important to achieving our goals and also to including the SDGs. Because we have to remember the ultimate objective of public procurement is to deliver, you know, public goods, works and services, and the things that are going to help us to achieve the SDGs. And public procurement can be a very for job creation, for local economic empowerment, for trade, for gender inclusion and responsiveness. And in order for those goals to be achieved, the The process needs to have integrity. So ultimately, what we're trying to pursue here today is strong, efficient, effective procurement processes that deliver results without letting corruption get in the way. And we can't manage what we can't measure. So one of the things we do at Open Contracting Partnership is we work with governments to introduce electronic procurement systems, electronic procurement systems that are transactional, that include disaggregated data, help them to achieve their goals. We've worked with more than 50 governments around the world. And as was noted by Anga and also by Sarah, this is an area where a lot of governments are still in their nascency. We have a lot of paper-based systems, a lot of systems that are still a lot of spreadsheets and things are happening more in an offline way or inconsistent use of digital solutions. So there is a need to help partners in these contexts and data scarce environments begin to start on their data journey in public procurement and the road to data-driven public procurement reform. And so with UNEP, we are developing a methodology that can be used in these more data scarce or data fractured environments or data siloed environments. That is more of an offline methodology, one that relies more on sampling. And the goal is really not to measure for the sake of measurement, but the idea is empowerment, right? The idea is helping partners to understand the value of the information they have and how they can start on that journey to begin to use it for integrity and other policy goals. The second thing, and this was also touched on in the presentations from Saudi Arabia and Italy, but the importance of institutional coordination and capacity, and including the capacity of civil society in these reforms, because having data is just one part of it. The next step is what do we do with it, and how can we collaborate around that to really make the most out of it. And so some of the examples I can share around that, in addition to the wonderful examples shared by Saudi Arabia and Italy today, in the Dominican Republic, where we've been working with the procurement to actually start to use targeted red flags in real time and combine procurement data with other government information to identify potential conflicts of interest and other risks. This is helping institutions decide where to intervene, because it's not just about identifying particularly risky cases, in which cases they're elevated for investigation and corrective action. Oh, to see the broader patterns across systems and to be able to intervene with capacity building to certain buyers, to intervene with policy changes, to intervene maybe with changes to technology that can help to not basically deter rather than to detect or in addition to detection. institutions to be able to leverage new technologies like artificial intelligence to improve their capacity. So for example, together with the OECD, we're supporting Poland to use artificial intelligence to evaluate procurement documents compliance with the law, especially with respect to competition neutrality. So this is just another way that institutions capacity can be strengthened by technology. But again, the institutional capacity has to be there. In Colombia, partnering with civil society and academic researchers to do an RCT to study the impact on political finance on public procurement and whether that can be deterred through through cooperation with the prosecutor's office, again, bringing institutions together to deter the impacts of political finance on negative procurement outcomes. And in Tanzania, working with the government to build red flags and efficiency dashboards that paired with supplier outreach has led to a tripling of suppliers awarded contracts, so tripling of the supplier base in Tanzania. and 30% faster tendering. And that's an important aspect as well because the private sector is the partner in public procurement. And if you want honest companies, if you want women-led businesses, small businesses to come and participate in public procurement, then we need to show them that it's safe for them to be there. And so that part of what this data can be used for is helping to build trust with the private sector. And then the final thing I'll just touch on, Or sorry, before I jump to that, I'll also mention since Vartika from the World Bank is here, we're working with the World Bank team to develop a beneficial ownership and transparency toolkit for public procurement. That can really, I think, be helpful for institutions starting to put those not just the data, but that way of working together, that institutional coordination and capacity together in order to move the dial on conflicts of interest detection. And then the final point I'll touch on is again, the outcome. So when we're thinking about the data that we need to collect, yes, the integrity data is very important. we also want to think about the outcomes we're trying to achieve. So for example, in Paraguay, we're using procurement data to help track school meal programs. So we're linking information about what the governments are buying, from whom, and what price across the delivery of meals across schools across the entire country. We're tracking the sustainable procurement so governments can see not only that things are being purchased at fair prices and that they're being delivered. integrity outcomes, but also whether sustainability requirements are translating into procurement practice, such as the purchase from local farms or family owned farms. In Brazil, we're applying similar thinking to medicines. We're using procurement data and artificial intelligence to do machine learning supported analytics to understand prices and purchasing patterns to support better, more efficient procurement of medicines. So again, having a real outcome on health and patients well-being. And in Ukraine, the same principle is being applied at a much larger level through DREAM, where we're connecting public investment information across, you know, the entire public investment management life cycle and actually supporting communities to get their projects approved and funded and supporting central management of public information, public investment management projects for the reconstruction of the entire country. So this measurement is, it can have a very profound outcome when it's channeled and supported through institutions and civil society partnerships. And we very much value our collaborations with UNODC and UNDP in these regards. So thank you to you all.

Thank you very much, Lindsay, for outlining the ways that the Open Contracting Partnership is thinking about data and using data and linking that to outcomes. And I appreciated your comments, particularly around how you're working in data scarce environments. If you go back to the map that was in Angus' presentation, you know, there were very strong regional patterns in terms of the data initiative that we are talking about here today and much that is around data scarcity and data capacities. So we very much appreciate the partnership with you and others on that issue. For the next comment, we are going also online to Ms. Vartika Niraj, who is a governance analyst at the Anti-Corruption for Development Program at the World Bank. Also, our partners, our broader partners in anti-corruption efforts within the international system and at global level as well. And it would be good to hear from new, how data and evidence can be better used to strengthen integrity in public procurement, and any opportunities you see for international organizations and partners to work closer together to support countries in strengthening their public procurement integrity. Vartika, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you so much to UNDP and the organizers for inviting us to this event. And I also want to thank the speakers from Italy and Saudi Arabia. It's genuinely exciting to hear about all the good progress being made on procurement integrity. And of course, huge congratulations to Anga and Mihaly and the UNDP GTI team, collecting procurement data at this level of granularity across 64 countries and making it comparable. That's a massive feat. So thank you very much for putting this together. actually spend some time on your beta dashboard that I believe was also shared in the chat that shares some of these global findings and beyond its analytical contribution I think we have to commend how accessible and user friendly it is that's very impressive when you have a tool like that that's so interactive that policy makers journalists civil society organizations generally can just sit with and navigate, I think that can be a game changer for oversight. So huge congratulations on that. I don't need to tell this audience why ensuring integrity and public procurement is important. We've heard about it from Sarah and other speakers. It's domestic resource mobilization. It's key for competition and really squarely a development issue. And to safeguard that integrity, we believe that risk-based approaches are key. We heard about this from one of the speakers. Good diagnostics and data is essential for identifying the highest risk areas so interventions can be as targeted as possible. And this can go a long way, particularly in context with constrained capacity and limited resources. So it was really good to hear that come up in the discussions and Yeah, complementing the excellent work shared here, our team at the bank has also been investing quite seriously in data-driven approaches, and I'll flag a few things without taking up too much time. A core bread and butter operation in our program is called the Governance Risk Assessment System, GRAS, which is, of course, the small world also supported by Mihaly and the GTI team. And it's essentially an advanced data analytics platform that can in specific countries process millions of procurement data points alongside other national data sets, including payrolls, bio registries, tax data. And it has the capacity to identify over 200 red flags. And this coupled with contextual human knowledge, it's actually been able to pick up quite nuanced inputs, including in Guatemala where it was able to pick up scheme where suppliers were piggybacking on each other every other year. And we thought that's pretty clever for a data system to pick up something so nuanced. And yeah, as we heard, every country is different in a different context. And we've really found this tool to be helpful in picking up the specific nuances. More broadly speaking, a whole of government data integration has been central to our approach. So this involves linking procurement data with beneficial ownership data, with customs data, and more, more is more, to really triangulate and identify the risks of illicit practices. BRASS is one piece of the larger picture. The other is, I think Lindsay mentioned this toolkit we're developing that brings together beneficial ownership data with procurement data. And we believe this kind of triangulation can be super important for good diagnostics. A lot of the speakers have also focused on digitalization and gov tech tools for procurement oversight. Again, that's very much on our agenda. And we've actively been working with our client countries to provide them actionable support when it comes to digital tools, particularly having sectoral focuses in mind. Like I think Inga mentioned, healthcare is a big one for procurement integrity. It's something we're aligned with and are trying to help our clients with. We recently released a report on govtech tools and anti-corruption measures. And echoing some of what we heard today, we found that digitalization beyond its direct technological impact can also make institutions and governance stronger. So interagency coordination, redress mechanisms, oversight. It really, I think those indirect ways in which technology can help are sometimes overlooked. And finally, in painting the whole picture of what my team is doing at the bank, And complementing very much what we've heard today, we're also exploring an expanded methodology for benchmarking procurement integrity globally. It's called ProAct, and we intend to cover roughly 43 indicators. I won't spend too much time about on this because it's very much a work in progress, but we see tremendous opportunity for collaboration with UNDP here. So again, thank you again for this excellent presentation. I hope I've not spoken for too long. And, yeah, thank you.

Thank you very much, Vartika, and for outlining some of the priorities of the Bank. And clearly, there are a lot of complementarities there. I know our teams speak regularly, and I think it's exciting that we can bring the best of different institutions and experiences in member states and create this capacity to learn from each other and to progress together. Last in terms of the scheduled speaker, but very much not least, is Ms. Fariyal Ahmed, who is a statistician manager of the Data4Now initiative of the UN Statistical Division. Over to you for your reflections.

Thank you so much, Sarah, for inviting me and also giving me an opportunity to reflect here. And I think I'm just going to start by saying that many of the speakers here shared the importance of measuring public procurement integrity as a critical component of the broader anti-corruption agenda, but also recognizing that it should not be addressed in isolation. To understand procurement risk effectively, countries need to examine them alongside other corruption-related phenomena, including bribery, illicit financial flows, conflicts of interest, and institutional vulnerabilities. This requires exploring the use of multiple data sources, such as admin data that, Sarah, you mentioned also early on, as well as survey data and data from civil society organization that can add value for the missing data. And procurement data can generate highly actionable evidence, but its value also becomes greater when it's connected to the broader national corruption measurement architecture and governance system, and interpreted alongside other forms of corruption risks and institutional responses. This integrated approach provides a more complete understanding of where vulnerabilities exist and how they can be addressed. International organizations and development partners have a unique opportunity to help countries strengthen public procurement integrity by moving beyond isolated interventions and supporting integrated evidence-based approaches to corruption measurement and prevention. Since the first global conference on corruption measurements, significant progress has been made in operationalizing the Vienna principles, developing innovative measurement tools, the methodologies that have been developed by UNDP, implemented by Italy and Saudi Arabia as well, as well as advancing the implementation of the UNODC statistical framework on measuring corruption, which was welcomed by the UN Statistical Commission in 2023 by member states. The framework with its 145 indicator provides countries with a comprehensive roadmap for building integrated national corruption information systems, including on procurement integrity measurement. The flexibility of the framework is one of its key strengths. Countries can prioritize their indicators most relevant to their context, capacity, and policy objectives, allowing them to strengthen corruption measurement of base that is both practical and sustainable. A key area where international organizations and partner can add value is fostering coordination. Effective corruption measurement is not the responsibility of a single institution. It requires collaboration amongst anti-corruption agencies, national statistics offices, procurement authorities, supreme audit institution, law enforcement bodies, and civil society for its support from development partners. Building these cross-institutional governance arrangement is a central principle for both the statistical framework, which was welcomed by the commission and the Vienna principles. And when anti-corruption institution and official statistics communities, I'm talking as a statistician here, work together, data can become a part of a regular cycle of reviewing objective, assessing progress, identifying bottlenecks, and adjusting policies over time. Our collaboration with UNODC in Kenya, Colombia, and Dominican Republic demonstrated the value of this approach. Through the operationalizing of the framework, we developed a practical guide that supports countries through a gradual, nationally led approach, similar to what UNDP is rightly focused on, is really that the approach is nationally led and priorities are identified by the countries themselves. We also developed a practical guide that supports the countries through a gradual and national approach following the UNODC statistical framework to measure corruption. Its development has been informed by practical experience from Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Kenya, as well as other countries who have implemented measurement of corruption in their respective countries beyond the perception indicators. Rather than beginning with the question, what do we already have? It encourages countries to start to a more strategic question. What anti-corruption priorities need to be informed by better statistics? Ultimately, the goal is to empower countries to understand and respond to corruption based on robust evidence rather than perceptions or rankings, as we have seen today by presentations from both UNGA, Italy, and Saudi Arabia on how actual data can help us understand where vulnerabilities exist. And by providing a common measurement framework, strengthening institutional coordination, and promoting the effective use of data, international organizations, development partners, and governments can work together to build a more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy public procurement system. Thank you so much, and congratulations to the countries for all the progress that is made. Thank you. Over to you.

Thank you so much, Farai, for outlining from the UN Statistics Division the perspectives on this. And I particularly appreciated your point about turning the question to actually not what do we have, but actually what do countries need. to be able to have an impact and move forward on the issues that concern them, what data and statistics do they need? We can use that as the starting point. So that brings us to the end of our scheduled speakers. We have about 15 or 20 minutes still together, so we have the opportunity to take questions both from in the room and online. I believe that those of you are questions or reflections or contributions or, you know, additions to the conversation. They don't need to be a specific question to a panelist or to a speaker. I believe those online should have instructions about how to submit your question. I think we're not able to open up the mics, but they will be relayed here in the room. I will open up first, I think, to people, I think we do have a few questions online, but first to anybody in the room who would like to speak. If you would like to speak, can you please press your microphone button to indicate, because we need to coordinate with our dear colleague in the tech room there, and then when you are given the floor, please introduce yourself, and I see the lady over there. Please go ahead.

Hi, do you hear me? Okay. Hi, I'm Maria Shwinika. I'm a student from Columbia University and thank you so much for this panel today. I definitely learned a great deal about it and I am very happy and honored to be here. I have a question that kind of sums up the entire conversation about the digitalization of the data of public procurement. and kind of not just about the data, but what happens afterwards and how do we support the institutions afterwards when it comes to actually investigating the data. So my question is, could this rapid greater digitalization of public procurement data lead to a risk of false sense of transparency? If procurement data is publicly available and sophisticated digital tools are available and being used to analyze it, but institutions don't have the capacity to investigate or enforce what they find, how do we really strengthen integrity in action? How do we help those institutions to develop systems that can respond to these risks and investigate them properly and effectively as well? And this is kind of for everyone, so thank you so much in advance.

Thank you so much. So I hear that as a question of, you know, what happens after the analysis, once the red flags are raised and particularly if there are capacity issues. So we'll come back maybe to some of the member states and some of the organizations that support to answer that. We'll take a round of questions. Is there anybody else in the room who would like to speak? I see the lady next to you.

Thank you very much and good day to everyone. I represent the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. And I would like to certainly thank the organizers of today's event and for all the insightful presentations and reports. The Russian Federation commends Saudi Arabia for the consistent effort to improve the methodology for measuring corruption. Russia has closely followed the initiative, both under the International Anti-Corruption Academy and now UNDP, since its launch and has contributed to relevant discussions in the anti-corruption, anti-government, intergovernmental fora and expert initiatives, in particular in the two global conferences organized in Vienna in 2023 and in New York in 2025. Russia has also co-sponsored Resolution 10/4 on the methodologies and indicators for measuring corruption, adopted by consensus by the Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption in 2023 as Saudi Arabia's initiative. I actually would like to make some questions, maybe to UNDP primarily. and those who contributed to the development of the procurement indicator. Many, many times throughout the presentations, the speakers mentioned that these are actionable indicators. However, in practical terms, and please be very specific, what action countries can take based on these indicators, because we have thoroughly analyzed the information regarding Russia, which is published on the demo version of the Anti-Corruption Compass. And frankly, and Anga, you know that we do have concerns. We had informal discussions with the experts. Another question is about the global character of this instrument. How are you actually going to collect information on most countries? Because now you have like a target group of 57 countries, mostly G20 countries, so OECD countries, but actually there are a lot of countries around the world who do not have this data. Frankly, they do not have the capacities and the resources to collect, analyze, and let alone publish on the internet all this data. So how are you going to do that? My third question is about domestic context. Some speakers also said that this is, you have adopted a country sensitive approach, but again, based on our analysis of the data regarding Russia, we really do have concerns. And I would like to kindly ask you to elaborate on actually, how do you take into consideration domestic context? How do you analyze the different domestic laws and not only on procurement because many things can be related to procurement but do not have the word procurement in the title. How do you analyze the organization of procurement systems, the functioning of domestic or internal public administration? And in principle, how do you take into consideration the structure and the level of development of the economy, the general governance systems in the countries? Because all these elements do determine the quality and the quantity of the data that are out there on procurement. And last but not least, You also mentioned that the data you have for now is comparable. And you know that this is also another sensitive issue that has been raised by Member States in various intergovernmental fora. We understand that if it is comparable, it is comparable also across countries, which means that potentially it can lead to some sort of rankings. And in this case, I understand that we are still very, very far away from that, but this can potentially be a ranking branded the United Nations. And this is a very serious thing, and this is great responsibility for UNDP. Also because actually countries didn't mandate UNDP to undertake this exercise through any sort of resolution or decision or whatsoever. So this is a sensitive question. This is just not a question I'm making, but this is a concern that we have been constantly raising throughout all this process. I thank you.

Thanks to the distinguished delegate of the Russian Federation for her comments and questions, and I will turn to my colleague, Anga, to respond to the specifics of those. Is there anybody else in the room who would like to make a contribution, a comment, or a question? I don't see anybody. We have a couple online, I think. Naisan, can you share those with us?

Yes, I have two questions from online. The first is from Mario in Paraguay. And Mario says, how can supreme audit institutions use these red flags in real time and not only after contracts are complete? How can supreme audit institutions use these red flags in real time and not only contracts are complete? The second question comes from Demi in the Dominican Republic, and the question is, Are there any countries where the contract award decisions are already generated or made wholly or partially through automated systems or artificial intelligence? Are there any countries where the contract award decisions are already generated or made wholly partially through automated systems or artificial intelligence? I do have a third specific AI question, but I could save that one, I guess, till later.

I think we will just do Probably one round. So maybe if you have another question, then do.

Okay. The last question is from Natalie. And she's asking, the statement is the five indicators rely on structured transactional data, but a lot of risks sit in the tender documents themselves. Did your country studies cover this descriptive part of the tender documents? did you use AI to analyze it or do you know the countries that are already doing this so kind of related to the previous question but around the specifications or specificities of tender documents and the details therein.

Okay, so I'm getting some guidance here on who is the best technical specialist we have with us to answer the different questions. But what I think I will do first is to come back to the member state members of the panel. So for any comments that they wish to make first to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and then to Italy, then I will turn to UNDP for any contributions and then to other partners who we have online and feel free you know, to answer the different bits of different questions that you heard, including the questions that we started with on capacity. There were obviously a number of detailed questions around methodology and so forth from the Russian Federation, and then some quite technical specific questions at the end there. So first to Nasser Hata, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for any comments.

Okay, so I believe.

The lady here in the room, she asked specifically about what happens after you gather the data and to analyze it, am I correct?

Really integrated into systems that they are supported enough to carry out the investigations and thorough investigations after all of this data is now digitalized and public procurement data is available.

Okay. Well.

I mean, from our experience of doing this exercise with the UNDP from the GTI assessment, as I believe if you heard the representative from GTI say that after they analyzed the contracts in Saudi Arabia, they identified a number of contracts that were high risk and they reported those to us. So what we did is we, what we are doing right now is we're currently analyzing those contracts and able to determine whether corruption actually happened or not. Because, I mean, as I said in my statement that, okay, these these AI powered machines, they can absolutely flag specific contracts that would be high risk for corruption. But then it's up to the person, the investigator, the authorities themselves to actually analyze these contracts to determine whether corruption has happened or not. I mean, and then you can also look at it, look at these reports and see where you can close the loopholes in your regulatory systems and the platforms that you have these contracts on. If it shows that, you know, there's a lot of single bidding or non-open procedures, you can go in and you can make these changes to ensure that there's integrity there and the risk of corruption has reduced.

Thank you very much. I'll hand the floor to the Italian National Authority online.

Yes, thank you very much. Very quickly, because the time, just to address a couple of questions from the first person there in the room and also from the colleague from Paraguay, maybe. So I think that, first of all, Uh, if we think about if the topic or the question, uh, the focus of the concern is that, um, uh, data that… public procurement, but in general, we can talk about anti-corruption initiative are available. If this is not enough, because then we have to proceed with initiatives oversight and so on. I think this question is a good news because if we have data, it's something very important, not first, because maybe till some years ago, the first problem was to try to collect data. So now it seems that we are going to get data, maybe not in all countries, as it was mentioned, but the very good news is that now we can have this data. This data can be used for sure, as we mentioned for the Italian experience, by institutions like us or other such institutions. For example, in Italy, not only the national anti-corruption authority, but also the Supreme Audit Institution, as was mentioned by another participant. But more in general, as we try also to underline, we don't have to consider this data only at disposal of institution, where in the country where this institution exists and have the power of resources to address the analysis of data and the outcome of the analysis. It is important to consider this data at disposal of the entire national and international community, because everyone also, for example, in Italy, it is very important the role of NGOs relevant in the field. In some other countries, it can be very useful, this data, for data journalists, sure we are not talking about institutional actors, but they can raise to the attention of public opinion, specific concerns, specific analysis, a lot of troubles, problem, risk and so on. And so this can also feed a national debate that can be useful for the general awareness, but also to to give some knowledge to policymakers to enable new policies or new initiatives. So I think that the availabilities of data, it is always a good news. It is not something that can be just give an appearance of transparency, but something that is very useful. And all institutions are invited to participate in the use of this data, but not all institutions but also other actors at national and international level, such as research institutes, like the research today presented by GTI and UADP are a very good example.

Thank you very much. In a minute, I will give the floor to UNDP and then to GTI and to the Open Contracting Partnership and then to any of the other speakers who would like to make a remark. But Khalid, you had one additional point that you wish to make.

Yes, thank you. And it was just to the point or the question raised by the distinguished representative of the Russian Federation. So she asked a question on the country context and how it's taken into consideration. And I'm just speaking from the kingdom's own experience with doing this exercise. And it's actually a current process that we're going through right now. So after we were presented with the initial analysis from GTI, we were able to go through it and analyze the areas that they marked as high risk. And then we kind of went down to a lower level, close to the contract level, to see why these areas were flagged as high risk. Then we noticed that some of these things don't really align with our I would say the context and our laws and everything like that. So we spoke, we're speaking and we spoke with GTI and explained to them, well, our legislation has X, Y, and Z in it. And this is used to prevent corruption in these areas. This is how we use it. It might be different than how I would say Europeans, South Americans, Africans would use it, but at the same time, it works for us. So then they were able to go in and kind of adjust their assessment to kind of show a lower score of high risk areas in specific areas because we have measures in place. So from our experience, this GTI assessment really does take the country context into consideration when doing the assessment.

And.

It's understood, I guess, from them that not every country can be compared similarly to each other at all, because each country, of course, has a different type of institution there. So this is just from our experience so far that we were able to speak with UNDP and GTI about this in order for them to really give us more of an objective analysis of where risks lie in the procurement system.

Thank you, Khalid. So I will pass the floor to UNDP to respond. Obviously, there are a number of specific questions from the Russian Federation, which is part of an ongoing dialogue with member states on this initiative and an ongoing commitment from UNDP to be in dialogue with member states. So I'm sure you won't be able to answer everything within the context of this meeting, but also if there are any other issues related to other questions that you want to pick up, Anga.

To the distinguished representatives from Russian Federation, our dear Natalia, first of all, thank you for following our initiative from the very beginning. We had like, you know, countless discussion even during the G20, our lunch break, I still remember. And then we, you have also written really very good comments and input. You know, by now we would have already launched it, our global data dashboard. The very reason why we are doing more consultation is because we also realize that, does it make sense? You know, at the end of the day, the end users are our member states. It's not UN or UNDP, and it also goes back to what Paril earlier said, what next? So I think the category, three, four categories of issues you have raised, they really make sense. We also have input from a couple of other member state as well. The first issue on action level, when I say action level, it looks like, okay, there is data, just do the action type of thing, but what I mean by that is, at least we produce the baseline data, then Italy and Saudi Arabia can carry on that. And now we have more detailed country level, you know, diagnosis and with more indicators and so on. So that was the basis, you know, at least, okay, this was high risk. These are the areas, I mean, these are the areas need to be further investigated. And then we do the detailed country case studies, and that's number one. So the actionable meaning that there is a follow up based on this, we can't be judgmental, just looking into the initial set of these risks. Even we are now trying to, you know, not, you know, even, I mean, with the terminology using some kind of like corruption risk or something, we are finding some wording like priorities areas to be further reviewed or something, see? So if we say that, then it goes back to with the ranking thing. If we say these are the corruption risk, then if we put the country list there, then it already some kind of, okay, you are a kind of ranking exactly what you were mentioning. But we are also putting the note there, don't compare countries. The reason why even we don't have the index, like Meshi was presenting for Saudi Arabia and also for Italy, is that we want to look at different indicators as they are, meaning that they are not even combined to one indicator. So these are just the risk areas. Ideally, we could have been using like 61 red flags, you know, even our methodology has 163. But the best we could do to look at global, I mean, I mean, set of countries is just using those five. So yeah, so that's the thing. And then the country context, the sensitive context, we are trying to make sure that we are not misquoting or mis, you know, kind of like including some those data and even the definition and so on. So this is the reason why both our ZTI colleagues and ourself are in consultation with countries. If there are specific country context, we would like to also highlight that in a footnote somewhere or upfront, you know, this is the case in that countries. Then going back to actionable point, what I mean by that is For example, if we do not have enough machine readable data, that's what we realize in case of Russian Federation as well, if you want to go to different regions and, you know, state and so on. So, yeah, so then also we are providing reason why we were not able to calculate all those five indicators for one country, just one indicator for that country, you know, it also looks bad. It's not because we were not able to calculate it. It's not like if you see high risk for just one indicator. So these Some of the issues now we are discussing from technical side, from the, you know, the, the sensitivity, political sensitivity side as well, and we'll try to at least, uh, improve over what we have. And then the countries where we can't calculate anything. So I already mentioned that we are working on an additional methodology, at least to help countries to do assessment together with open contracting partnership and so on through our UNDP country offices. We are also in discussion with NASA, but this is a gold standard. If we ideally, every country should be providing through the centralized mechanism, all procurement data by sectors, by different regions, by different ministries or local or federal level and so on, then we can just take the data and try to calculate the percentage of single bidding or percentage of contracting negotiation, this and that. But then the country contexts are different. and the threshold is also different in different countries. But at least it gives a good global picture though. Why there is a larger percentage of single bidding in many countries, it's also because there is less intensity for audit as well as the competition required for the smaller amount of contracts is less than the larger amount of contract. But During now going forward, we'll continue this dialogue and discussion with each country. And we'll organize another round of consultation and we will keep improving. This is like a living document. We are not saying -- I'm done.

Thank you. Thanks for that response. We are pushing against time, but I would like to hand the floor to Dr. Fazekas from GTI, if he has any reflections in relation to the questions and contributions we've heard.

Thank you very much, Sarah, and I'm sorry for everyone for running over, but let me pick up a few points which have been mentioned before and some which haven't been addressed yet. So I think the domestic or country context is very important. And indeed what Khalid mentioned, what Unga mentioned, so part of this consultation, but also part of the in-depth country studies is to Make sure that the definition of the red flags of the indicators fits the local context. What do I mean here? So, for example, a procedure type risk on the mentioned is one indicator. So understanding which procedure type is more open, which procedure type is less open, which procedure type starts with a call for tender is a complicated matter. So we need member states input to correctly categorize their procedure types used in the national context into more open and less open categories. So this is one way of taking into account national regulatory differences. The second point mentioned by the Russian representative is also very good, country context in terms of supply markets maturity. Indeed, there are countries where there is a lot less, there are a lot fewer potential suppliers. So one of the reasons why we allow for filtering the data by region, by sector, by contract value, is exactly to show this diversity. In some countries, single bidding is high in a particular region, in a particular product market, because there are no suppliers. That, information is known to users of this dashboard to come from that country so they can filter the data in a way that they get to the part of the data where that information, single bidding or not, is relevant. I also want to react on the previous questions and comments on what to do with this information, how actionable these indicators. Single bidding is, for example, one indicator And Anok mentioned they are tracking that the European Commission even has single bidding targets for member states. So this is very actionable because if you see high single bidding rate on markets where you know that there are suppliers, potential bidders, then government can say, okay, you want to change the regulatory framework, Khalid mentioned that. B, maybe the regulatory framework is all okay, but there's some behavioral problems. Buyers tend to go for the same suppliers always. So there is some sort of training for them or some other intervention opening up the market. In some cases, it's suppliers are not willing, potential suppliers are not willing to bid, so you need to treat them like an information campaign. I think there was someone asking questions from Bangladesh. This has been done in Bangladesh, for example, to motivate potential bidders to bid in otherwise thin bidding markets. So there are a lot of things governments can do when they see high single bidding rates, and I think it's one of the most actionable indicators we have. There was also an online question on going beyond these relatively straightforward structural information like number of bidders, so on and so forth, and start to dig deeper into the text, into the tendering terms. This has been identified as an indicator in the initial review process for the project. However, it's not something we can easily make comparable across countries. So this is an indicator which, for example, GTI and UNOP in part of an iMonitor project, we are deploying and supporting investigators to use machine learning, natural language processing to identify restrictive tendering terms. So yes, there is knowledge there. No, I don't think this is an indicator which is ready for global rollout, but in in-depth studies, I think This is something which is very much actionable. And you can see, for example, this on opentender.eu, which we are running for European countries. You have Italy, Spain, and some other countries, France. This indicator, you can directly look at it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I would like to just check with Vartika from the World Bank, whether she would like to make literally one minute further comment. If so, can you jump in?

Hi, Sarah. I'm actually all good. I have to jump off bed.

Okay. Thanks. Thanks so much for joining us. And then I will hand very briefly to Farid just for one brief moment.

To all the comments here. I mean, thank you so much. It just comes back to the point that, you know, this all requires coordination between anti-corruption agencies and other institutions within the government. I take your question on how supreme audit institutions can get real-time information. I think it's a partnership between anti-corruption agencies, national statistics office, and different agencies to work together to see that the statistics that is produced meets the needs of the decision makers. And that's where it's a partnership, not only in the production, not only in the dissemination and use, but also the production of the statistics. That's it for me. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So that brings us to the end of a long workshop where we have heard from many different stakeholders, from member states, from international organizations, from other technical entities. And I'm not going to attempt to sum up two and a quarter hours of discussion. fully, but I think we have gone on a trajectory from where we looked at the importance of public procurement in terms of trust and the social contract to then seeing a number of examples, very interesting, exciting examples from member states and from analysis of data from member states about how this growing data footprint can be used to support procurement integrity. We have also had a conversation about what happens in countries that do not have either that data footprint or the capacity to follow up. We have just had a very interesting conversation about what actionability means. And we have highlighted the country specificity of all of this and the need that even while you're looking at big data, even as AI is increasingly employed, there is real qualitative and country specific aspects that need to be taken into account in terms of impact and implementation. And then we have also highlighted again the need for collaboration and cooperation and coordination at all levels, a whole of government and a whole of society approach, but also within international organization and within the broader international community. So I would just like to wrap up by thanking very much those who have participated here, member states, civil society, academia, others, thank the government of Italy and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for co-hosting with us and for their ongoing partnership in this, and look forward to carrying on the conversation with all of you on this topic. Thank you very much. and thank you to the team who put this together and to our colleague in the tech box for his excellent yeah he's sticking his thumbs up thank you all and thanks to all of you also online many of you will have stayed late in the day we appreciate you staying with us bye-bye