Contracts, Data and Investigations – Edition 70
This month: Rich and poor in Latin America, the cost of doing business in Spain, using Google Earth to track companies in Nigeria, and our new Data Registry providing access to open contracting data
In this newsletter, we cover stories about the use and abuse of public contracts and provide tips and insights on how to investigate public procurement. Are you investigating a public contract right now? Get in touch – we’d love to help.
[What we are keeping an eye on]
Widening the gap: Public spending during the pandemic affected poor and rich neighborhoods differently. In Latin America, rich municipalities continued to keep their parks green, while in poor neighborhoods critical infrastructure such as school upgrades were delayed, according to a regional investigation by the data journalism network Red Palta (Red de Periodistas de América Latina para la Transparencia y la Anticorrupción) (versión en español). Red Palta analyzed the budgets and execution of the 30 richest and 30 poorest urban municipalities in Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico and Guatemala between 2019 and 2022. In all countries except Uruguay, there are vast disparities between the budgets of the rich and poor municipalities. Read the regional story here. National investigations were developed by Peru’s OjoPúblico, Mexico’s Animal Político, Colombia’s La Silla Vacía, Chile’s La Bot, Guatemala’s Ojoconmipisto, and Uruguay’s La Diaria. (Full disclosure: The investigation was supported by OCP.)
What’s the price of admission to a shady deal-making network? Spain’s Mediator Case provides some insights, as summarized by 20Minutos. A €5,000 “toll” made out to a sports association, supposedly benefiting children, would allow interested businesses to join the inner circle. Official negotiations in government offices would be followed by lavish celebrations. The bill to celebrate the deals with prostitutes in hotels and brothels would add up to €3,000. Read a short summary in English by The Local’s Conor Faulkner.
Cases like these make it additionally worrying that direct awards have increased to 40%, up from 33% since 2019, El Diario’s Antonio Vélez finds.
Dataphyte’s Olanrewaju Oyedeji maps Google Earth satellite imagery with company information and open contracting data to expose how Nigeria’s Osun state government flouted procurement laws to award N82 million in contracts for paper production.
[Data insights]
We love to see and celebrate the amazing data journalism projects selected for the Sigma Awards. One of this year’s winners was Colombia’s Cuestión Pública project Game of Votes. The platform used gamification to link up political finance data, including lobbying and contracts, to investigate the influence of businesses ahead of Colombia’s local elections last year.
In the UK, the NHS paid private hospitals around £2 billion to help care for patients in the first year of the pandemic. But these facilities were massively underused, according to an investigation by the British Medical Journal’s Esther Oxford, raising questions about the decision to buy hospital capacity rather than paying for activity that was delivered. The investigation relied on data released by the NHS in late 2022, following freedom of information requests from the Centre for Health and Public Interest.
If you’re curious whether the UK government is keeping their promise to publish all COVID-19 pandemic contracts, follow Chris Smith on Twitter as he shares his insights of the agreements trickling in.
Get public contracts data for Assam, India on this platform developed by the Civic Data Lab team: https://assam.open-contracting.in. The tool allows users to explore and analyze Assam's public procurement data with a particular focus on contract data for health, water and sanitation, and flood management.
[Tips from practitioners]
We checked in with Ojo Público’s Nelly Luna, who coordinated the earlier mentioned Red Palta investigation, to get some insights:
We noticed in all the countries, except Uruguay, the budgets of the rich and poor communities are vastly unequal. I wonder if we, as journalists, could begin a discussion about how budgets reproduce the inequality gaps in the region and analyze other mechanisms for distributing budget funds.
With these investigations, one common challenge is defining the indicators. So, for example, to determine the poorest and richest districts we had to identify similar types of measurement because not all countries had the same methodological indicators. While Peru and Uruguay had 2019 Human Development Index (HDI) data, Guatemala only had data from 2018, while for Chile, Colombia and Mexico, we had to use multidimensional poverty figures because they did not have HDI reports.
When it came to public procurement data, we had to do manual follow up where information was not uploaded to the official systems, particularly in poorer districts. So we had to combine data analysis with in-person visits to review the contract documents. In other cases, we had to refer to platforms that manage economic transfers. Although the contract was not available, we could check the distribution of the budget, and while we did not have the contract, we could reference the amount for services provided.
It was precisely in the poorest municipalities where the least was known.
“Justamente para los más pobres es donde menos se sabia.”
Nelly Luna, Ojo Público
[Tools & resources]
The Open Contracting Data Registry at http://data.open-contracting.org is the first public tool to provide access to open, re-usable, and standardized data on public procurement from more than 50 countries and cities.
Through the registry, you can filter information by publisher, date range, update frequency, and the fields it has: for instance, if you are just interested in publications that have data on implementing a contract. You can also learn more about each data source, its data quality issues and download the data in JSON and tabular format (XLSX or CSV). Get a walkthrough of the registry in this video.
This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Thanks for reading. Do give us a like if you’ve enjoyed the read.