Adoption of e-procurement in Rwandan Public institutions

Sammanfattning: In the modern competitive business environment, government institutions need to embrace information communications technology to remain competitive. Procurement has been recognized as a priority government agenda by many public sector agencies worldwide. In the same line the Government of Rwanda has taken several initiatives to streamline its public procurement system to bring it into line with the fundamental principles of transparency, competition, economy, efficiency, fairness, and accountability. Seminega the director of Rwanda public procurement authority stated that e-procurement can help the Government of Rwanda to reach to the above-mentioned principles .E-procurement can be described as an electronic way of procuring goods and services as well as other procurement process activities with the help of internet and other information and communication technologies systems. Before the adoption of e-procurement in some institutions in Rwanda, all the procurement activities were done traditionally in their institutions and this procurement method has been criticized for having many deficits, that contributed to huge losses in public funds and lacks transparency, accountability, and fair competition. In this regard, the government of Rwanda decided to adopt an e-procurement system in its public institutions. the e-procurement system was launched in August 2016. The pilot stage started with eight public institutions, ministry of finance and economic planning is one of them and it is a case study used in this thesis research. it has been selected by the researcher because it is a cross-cutting ministry in the procurement process. Different forms of e-procurement have been discussed as well as benefits and challenges associated with the adoption of e-procurement. the purpose of this research study is to examine how the e-procurement system is used and explore the benefits and challenges associated with its adoption in Rwanda’s public institution. Qualitative research was chosen, and a case study was conducted in the ministry of finance and Economic planning. The source of data for the empirical is from personal interviews and second data. The findings of the present study demonstrate that the adoption of the e-procurement system brought several benefits to MINECOFIN but also it presents challenges associated with the adoption of e-procurement