The Goods on Buying Local

This week’s Fist Bump goes to VL Home Office’s Enobasi Ekanem and VL Kenya’s Zeddy Bore, Catherine Kamau, and Timothy Githinji for leading the recent Local Procurement Life Cycle training. This training, which follows the Local Procurement Tracker Training conducted in March 2020, emphasized the local procurement process before the RFQ stage.

The training was designed to address the challenges country teams face in procuring local goods and services, such as IRS materials and commodities, hardware materials, consumables, vehicles for hire, food vendors, water supply, internet, and more. This training is part of a larger effort to ensure compliance with project, corporate, and USG guidelines for procurement, transparency in processes, and sound decision making, all of which contribute to cost containment.

Over the past year, Enobasi has developed a consistent and user-friendly tracking tool that helps to identify issues earlier in the procurement cycle, which in turn, supports short- and long-term decision making.

The training discussed how local procurement is handled by the larger Abt team, the procedures and policies that must be followed, the procurement timeline, and how to plan and budget for local procurement. The training outlined the Request for Quotes and the Review and Award process and included a panel discussion on best practices and lessons learned, showcasing the VL Kenya Site Team.

Approximately 60 participants, including COPs, Procurement Managers, Ops Managers, M&E Managers, and Technical Managers, attended the WebEx training.

Kudos, Eno, Zeddy, Catherine, and Timothy! Well-done.