Policy Brief: Public Procurement and Infrastructure - The Corruption Problem in Sierra Leone

• Public procurement remains one of the highest-risk corruption areas in Sierra Leone. It promotes political interference and leakages through weak monitoring, discretion, and opaque manual processes.
• Theoretical insights show that e-procurement can reduce corruption by addressing principal-agent problems through audit trails and transparency. However, collective action and political economy dynamics revealed that technology alone cannot shift behaviour in the face of systemic corruption.
• Ukraine’s Prozorro demonstrates that mandatory digital workflows, civil society oversight, and political will can significantly reduce discretion, expand competition, and institutionalise transparency even in crisis.
• Tanzania’s NeST shows that the government can build systems that can deliver and promote transparency and fiscal savings. NeST attracted strong institutional leadership, compliance enforcement, and nationwide capacity building.
• Both cases highlight that e-procurement succeeds when there is a strong political will to drive these digital tools, which establishes credible sanctions, promotes consistent utilisation, and provides incentives that make corruption very costly.
• In Sierra Leone, the technology is available; the gap is the governance process of the e-GP. Implementation of the e-GP is challenged by mandatory adoption across MDAs, a stronger NPPA to impose fines for non-compliance, and restructuring coalitions that protect the system from political capture.

Procurement, Infrastructure, Corruption

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