The COVID-19 pandemic has tested the resilience of procurement systems around the world, as governments strive to deliver critical public goods while mitigating the risks of relaxing procurement rules to cope with the demands of this global emergency.

To explore how public procurement during the pandemic was done in the Philippines, researchers study a novel dataset on COVID-related government contracts worth PHP 20 billion (USD 400 million), representing nearly 60% of the total value of publicly available contracts as of August 2020. The research aims to identify, quantify and propose ways to mitigate risks in the country’s emergency procurement system by exploring the value, duration, price, process and document quality of these publicly available contracts.

Ultimately, this report proposes ways for civil society, government, journalists, business, and the academe to collaborate to systematically verify and improve the quality of procurement data in order for procuring entities to buy better and be more responsive to people’s needs in future COVID-19 purchases and in future emergencies.