He was speaking at an orientation workshop for national procurement trainers at the LGED Auditorium in Dhaka on 31 January 2019.

The CPTU and the consulting firm ITCILO organized the workshop as a kick-start to the Capacity Building and Professionalization programme under the Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project (DIMAPPP).

The CPTU has been implementing the project with support from World Bank and the Turin-based ITCILO has been engaged through a competitive process as consultant to implement the CPD programme over the next four years in partnership with ESCB.

The Secretary in Charge was present as the Chief Guest while outgoing Director General of CPTU Md Faruque Hossain, Task Team Leader of DIMAPPP and Lead Procurement Specialist of World Bank Dhaka office Dr. Zafrul Islam and Team Leader of CPD Richard Lorenz were also present.

The Secretary in Charge in his opening speech said, “I mainly see two parts as prominent in any project. One is procurement and the other is implementation. And sweet part is procurement and bitter part is implementation.”

Stressing the need for ensuring quality of training, he said national trainers have a great role and responsibility in fighting any corruption in public procurement. 

“You not only extend trainings, but also have the capacity to offer ideas at your offices to put comments to avoid all anomalies”, he observed. Abul   Mansur Md Faizullah, ndc, said nepotism is also a kind of corruption. He laid emphasis on selection of right materials and maintenance of the standard of procurement as per law for project implementation.

The DG, CPTU said the beginning of the CPD implementation is happy news for procurement community of Bangladesh. He said ITCILO worked with the government in the process of reforms in public procurement along with creation of CPTU in 2002. Basic policies were framed.

He said, “Now the dimension is different. In DIMAPPP we have 18 types of training. There are 4 tiers of professional certification.”

The DG, CPTU observed that CPTU and the national trainers should speak in same line regarding explanations on various public procurement issues. He mentioned that the national trainers need to keep them updated with rules. A national trainer may belong to a particular government office. When he goes for providing training to other offices or venues that need to be considered a government responsibility, he noted.

The TTL in his speech said, “The total annual value of public procurement in Bangladesh is now 16 billion US Dollars. One per cent savings from that value can build 1600km rural roads.” 

He said the national trainers are contributing to improvement of public procurement management in Bangladesh. Today’s scenario is the result of reforms carried out in the last 16 years. 

At present there are 59 national trainers on public procurement and most of them were present at the workshop. The objective of the workshop was to orient them with the contents of CPD and other practices in public procurement now prevailing at home and abroad. The ITC ILO will utilize the expertise of them in implementation of the CPD.

The Team Leader made a presentation on the plans and status of the CPD. Ms. Blerina Pogace, Procurement Content Specialist, ITC ILO, joined the workshop on the screen. She made a presentation on introduction to module revisions.

Masud Akhter Khan, Director of CPTU, made a presentation on the changes brought to the Public Procurement Rules-2008 which need to be addressed in training modules. At the end, there was a question-answer session. The national trainers raised various issues. The DG, CPTU responded and gave clarifications to their queries.