Speakers at a dialogue on Sunday underscored the need for creating an enabling environment in public procurement system for ensuring participation of women to make the system suatainable for better implementation of development projects.
For this, it is a dire need to bring necessary policy changes to create an enabling environment where women entrepreneurs can largely participate at public procurement.
They were speaking at a policy dialogue on ‘Engaging Women Entrepreneurs in Public Procurement’ held at the conference room of the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) of the Implementation Monitoring Evaluation Division (IMED) of the Planning Ministry.
Ministry of Planning in association with International Trade Centre and Business Initiative Leading Development (BUILD) organised the dialogue.
Nurul Amin, Secretary, Planning Division, Ministry of Planning, spoke at the programme as the chief guest while Md. Ali Noor, Director General (Additional Secretary) of the CPTU spoke as special guest.
Luna Shamsuddoha, Chairman of Dohatech Tech spoke as guest of honour. Ferdous Ara Begum, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BUILD chaired the dialogue.
Secretary said, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in a recent ECNEC meeting gave necessary directives to simplify the policy on public procurement so that participation of women increases in the process. “Women’s participation in public procurement can encourage corruption-free tendering system and boost development programmes,” he said. Prime minister is also working to ensure access to finance for women and she is also sincere to bring down bank interest rates to single digit.
Md. Ali Noor assured the women entrepreneurs that the CPTU would positively consider necessary changes in the policy in order to allow women entrepreneurs to participate in public procurement.
He said, experience of private sector is not considered for government works because of the public procurement rules to cope with international practices.
While presenting a keynote paper on the topic, Mehruna Islam Chowdhury, Gender Consultant of BUILD, pointed out major challagengs and drawbacks in the policy for which the participation of women entrepreneurs in the public procurement process is not increasing.
Ensuring access of women to public procurement information is also urgently required. Creating awareness among women is necessary to overcome challenges. Service sector needs more documentation and to aware women for overcoming those through giving them knowledge.
They lack capacity for business profile like registration and other.
WE need to have clear understanding on areas where the capacity building is needed the most. A database of women entrepreneurs may be maintained that will be helpful for orgsnizing women related trainings and programmes.
She said, women are not aware of the differences in the documents required for tendering in case of goods, works, services as more documents are required in case of tendering in services where women entrepreneurs will be more fitted. Women entrepreneurs do not have the capacity to develop business profile and documentations required for that and so training is required before registration as tenderer.
