With the goal of attaining a harmonize procurement guidelines in the implementation of the Department of Agriculture – Philippine Rural Development Project (DA-PRDP) subprojects, a two-day Procurement Training and Workshop on the World Bank Harmonized Procurement Guidelines was conducted on August 19-20, 2020 in Jasaan, Misamis Oriental.Jeffrey Baja, DA-PRDP 10 Procurement Head, said “it is important that we level off our understanding with the procurement guidelines to have a smooth flow during the procurement stage, avoid big failures and misprocurement, and unnecessary refunds.”

On the other hand, Carmelita T. Bajarla, DA-10 Regional Technical Director for Research and Regulations and Investments in Rural Enterprise and Agriculture and Fisheries Productivity 10 (IREAP-10) Component Head, emphasized that “even though our participants are already knowledgeable about the procurement guidelines, there is a need to further study the guidelines set by the World Bank because this is a rule and this is also what we are following. So I hope you will learn new things that you can apply as [Bids and Awards Committee] members and to your organization as well.”

Aside from the presentation of the harmonized procurement guidelines for works and goods, the said training is also conducted to orient the Proponent Groups (PGs) and Local Government Units (LGUs) of their roles and responsibilities in the procurement stage.

This is the first of the three-leg training on harmonized procurement focused to PGs and LGUs with fund disbursement deadline by the end of 2020. The first leg is for Misamis Oriental to be followed by Lanao del Norte and Misamis Occidental. The said training was spearheaded by the IREAP-10 Component in coordination with the Procurement Unit of DA-PRDP 10, and attended by PGs and LGUs with IREAP subprojects. (Cyrus Seraspe| InfoACE 10)