Afghanistan public procurement

Atleast 15 pages of Theisis related to Afghanistan public procurement. the structure of the thesis should be something like that: 1. Introduction: brief background information; motivation; outline of the paper, including research questions and research methodology (these are crucial!). 2. General background information on public procurement in Afghanistan, focusing on your specific topic. 3. Award criteria or Evaluation process: legislation/ how it is applied (in Afghanistan/in NPA). 4. Discussion. This depend a lot on how you are going to work. It might include data analysis, comparison with other countries, detailed review of the regulation… 5. Conclusions/recommendations identify your research question. You have two alternative choices. 1. How to improve the tender evaluation process in Afghanistan in order to reduce risk of corruption? This is what I understood from your outline in the first place. In this case your focus should be on the process. 2. How to improve the evaluation criteria in order to achieve the main procurer’s goals – say value for money or reducing corruption? This is what I understood from your last email. In this case your focus would be on the competitive tendering design. (If you are afraid this subject is too narrow, you can be sure: it’s not!) Needless to say, many issues are common to both options, but their perspective is different. · In the first case you should base your work on literature on fighting corruption in procurement and review the evaluation process in NPA/Afghanistan, as well as the relevant regulation. To be sure, the evaluation process is particularly relevant when the contract is awarded using rated criteria, because evaluation is typically based on the discretion of the evaluation committee. Some relevant issues could be: how are members of the evaluation committee selected? Are they truly independent? Is there any regulation forbidding discriminatory criteria? Are award criteria transparently published in the tender documents? Are there sufficiently precise so as to limit evaluators’ discretion? Is there an effective reviewing body? · In the second case you should build upon international guidelines on award criteria (both the World Bank and UNOPS are good examples). This would be in line with my class on award criteria, your main goal would be to apply the same ideas in discussing the practice adopted in NPA/Afghanistan. Since this is actually a broad issue, you could decide (i) to focus on some specific category/market you are more familiar with; (ii) to deal with specific issues which are relevant in Afghanistan NPA. In any case, relevant issues would be: lowest price vs MEAT/rated criteria (depending on the nature of the contract): when would it be advisable to adopt MEAT? How to design rated criteria? In both cases, the more your work is based on the specific problems of NPA/Afghanistan, the better.