Promoting Gender-responsive procurement

WWe strive to ensure that all operations, including procurement processes, support its mandate to achieve gender equality and empower women. Gender-responsive procurement is the sustainable selection of services, goods, and works that considers the impact on gender equality that goes beyond cost management. It also involves leveraging purchasing and sourcing opportunities to promote gender equality and support social and economic progress through gender-responsive measures at all stages and tiers of procurement and the supply chain. It includes due diligence approaches to identify and mitigate risks to gender equality, including women’s rights and non-discrimination, as well as to identify opportunities to advance gender mainstreaming in the supply chain. We support the public and private sectors to leverage procurement to achieve great socioeconomic change for women by ensuring the gender responsiveness of the vendors and promoting women-owned businesses.

Gender-responsive Public Procurement

We work with public sector agencies to mainstream gender and promote gender equality through public procurement. We work with public sector agencies to promote gender equality through the purchase of works, supplies or services. Because of our work, buyers and suppliers look at the impact of all of the contracted activities related to women’s interests and concerns and design and deliver contracts in a way that reduces gender inequalities. Our work target inequalities in the workforce through the delivery of a contract, the way a contract is performed or the impact it has on women. To promote gender equality from the beginning of the procurement cycle means asking questions such as the following;

  • a) Do the services, supplies or works that I intend to buy have different implications for women in all their diversity?
  • b) Do women in all their diversity, have different needs in relation to the services, supplies or works to be purchased?
  • c) Which social and labour laws and collective agreements that promote gender equality at work are applicable to the contract?

Legal frameworks for gender-responsive procurement

We work to increase understanding of the legal, policy, and regulatory frameworks in which procurement is embedded, with a view to supporting the development and implementation of more gender-responsive policies and practices. The intended audience are stakeholders involved in supply chain management and procurement as buyers, suppliers, and policymakers, as well as workers, consumers, and community members.

Addressing Barriers preventing women from participating in procurement systems

  • Structural and systemic barriers relate to the intersecting dimensions of gender and other forms of inequality. For example, access to platforms in which procurement opportunities are publicized may be limited. These sites require access to the internet, financial resources and an understanding of how to navigate complex platforms – all of which can pose challenges to women-owned businesses in rural areas where education levels are lower than in cities and where information and communication technologies are in earlier stages of development.
  • Legal and policy barriers focus on the absence of frameworks with provisions to grant public contracts to achieve gender-equality goals. Without legal frameworks to create such provisions, current practices favouring male-owned businesses will continue to dominate public procurement systems. Unless gender-responsive policies are integrated throughout procurement practices, initiatives supporting women’s economic empowerment in procurement will be less effective at making lasting systemic changes.
  • Cultural and social barriers include the biases that affect women’s confidence in their skills and ability to become an entrepreneur. Often coming from discrimination and discouragement from personal networks, women report having reservations and a lack of confidence when engaging in predominantly male sectors. These factors are also conflated with the responsibilities of unpaid care work, leaving women with very little time to spend on businesses and engaging in the competitive procurement environment.
  • The financial barriers that pose a challenge to women-owned businesses when accessing procurement opportunities include a lack of liquid assets to be used to honour the tender or when competing against other bidders. Other factors include the lack of available collateral, such as owned property, which could be used to offset any barriers when acquiring loans from banks.
  • Corruption-related barriers also limit women’s participation in the public procurement process because they reduce trust in the bidding process and its competitive nature, and consequently discourage women-owned businesses from participating. Corruption is also associated with abuse of power for sexual exploitation. It works as a deterrent for women who fear sexual extortion at any point in the procurement process or the stigma associated with the perception of being sexually compromised or otherwise engaged in corruption.
  • Gender-based violence: Women who engage in the public procurement process are sometimes vulnerable to sexual harassment and gender-based violence. This situation is exacerbated by the absence of a grievance-redress mechanism within most public procurement spaces, as well as the lack of gender indicators in the annual procurement audits.
  • Lengthy delays in payments are a major problem, especially for Women owned Businesses and deter them from engaging in procurement. Women report that payments from public sector institutions are often late and unpredictable. Unlike large companies, women-owned and women-led SMEs lack the liquidity to pre-finance contract commitments and are therefore unable to accept long repayment terms.
  • Limited information and awareness of tender opportunities: In Uganda, many women report that they acquire information about procurement opportunities through men (male colleagues, relatives, and staff). This points to limited procurement information, but also insufficient mentoring and networking relationships among women-led businesses. Awareness and understanding of the various steps in the public procurement process are low among women-led businesses.
  • Prominent level of informality: Informal employment is a greater source of employment for women in Uganda. Women are more likely to engage in necessity entrepreneurship and be in informal enterprises compared to men. The smaller scale and informal nature of women’s entrepreneurship, caused by structural gender inequalities, hinder their capacity to meet the often-stiff requirements of large government contracts, which require suppliers to be formally registered.