The Prozorro.Sale project is nominated from Ukraine for an international award Open Government Awards and has every chance of winning on December 15.
This is the most prestigious award in the field of open governance. This year, it is dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Partnership, which unites 78 participating countries and 76 local members. Our project is competing for victory in the Impact Award category, as the one changing the country, improving the quality of life in society, and opening up the actions of the authorities.
In 2016, Ukraine with Prozorro, an e-system of public procurement, won the third annual award from the Open Government Awards.
For us, at Transparency International Ukraine, this was a key event of several years of work. After all, thanks to the interaction of the triangle “authorities-business-public,” we managed to implement the principle of “everyone sees everything” in procurement and demonstrate real results of transparent use of government data.
Since then, Ukrainian Prozorro has been an example for other countries. The system has grown from a pilot project of the public initiative into a truly irreplaceable part of open governance.
Prozorro.Sale is another revolutionary system that Ukraine, the Ministry of Economy, the Individual Deposit Guarantee Fund, and the National Bank initiated in 2016.
Today, it is the largest platform for the sale and lease of public property (property, land, state-owned enterprises, and other assets). We like to say that Prozorro.Sale is like “eBay for the government.”
What is so revolutionary about Prozorro.Sale?
Ukraine inherited many enterprises and property from the Soviets, alongside with opaque and inefficient management processes.
Now, not only the chosen ones, but everyone has access to assets! Foreign or Ukrainian investors, ordinary citizens or startups.
If someone had asked earlier if I believed that subsurface rights would be sold at electronic auctions, I would have answered: “Wake up!” However, now this is already a reality.
Prozorro.Sale publishes the lion’s share of information about public assets, their technical characteristics, and price in open data format.
This information used to be on paper in closed offices, or published fragmentary on the websites of local councils or in the newspaper “Bulletin of privatization,” for example, when the sale of public property was announced.
The most valuable element of the system is electronic auctions. To purchase or rent public property in Ukraine, businesses no longer need to negotiate under the table. Just register on Prozorro.Sale, choose an interesting lot, apply for participation online, and compete for the procurement of an asset. The winner is the one who offers the highest price.
Over the past 5 years, the system has launched many markets: the sale of assets of insolvent banks and property of bankrupts, subsurface rights, small-scale privatization and lease, and recently, the sale and lease of land as well.
When implementing the reform, we saw that the authorities at various levels have at their disposal wide expanses of real estate, abandoned buildings, unnecessary cars, and so on. Today, such assets are in the system with a declared value of UAH 1.45 trln. Imagine that! And this is not all the information about our national wealth!
Because there are dozens of electronic platforms (brokers) in the system today and the system is open, on average, the price per asset increases by 36.6% at the starting price at e-auctions. Over the past 5 years, the platform has earned almost UAH 59 bln.
Impressive, isn’t it?
Ukraine must win
Because this is a chance not only to show Ukraine’s ability to implement state-of-the-art IT solutions. For me, this is yet another argument why we are not a fail state, but a capable and resilient one. If we want to.
Therefore, it is crucial to demonstrate our achievements to the world and record our own success — for those who deals with reality in Ukrainian conditions on a daily basis.