Southern Africa Takes the Challenge against COVID-19

The third session of experience and knowledge sharing on public procurement in emergency on October 28, 2020 kept all its promises.

After the success of the first two sessions organized successively on September 22 and 23rd by the Technical Secretariat the African Public Procurement Network (APPN) for respectively East Africa and West Africa, it was the turn of the Southern Africa Public Procurement Network to take the challenge.

The session on « Public Procurement in Emergency-COVID-19-Country Experiences », gathered mainly member countries from Botswana, Eswatini, the Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In total thirty-eight (38) participants were around during the WebEx meeting for the experience sharing.

The keynote speaker, Mr. Alastair Merrill from Scotland gave a particular flavor to the session thanks to his presentation covering challenges and solutions to the pandemic. He was not alone for there were other interesting and rich presentations from member countries such as Namibia by Mr. François Dirkjohannes BRAND, Lesotho by Mr. Likotsi B. Leseli, Zimbabwe by Mr. Nyasha Chizu and Malawi by Mr. Ellias Hausi.

It was just a precious three-hour moment shared to reflect and exchange in order to reinforce understanding for a better positioning vis-à-vis COVID-19.