Driving change through public procurement

The objective of this Toolkit is to enable public procurement policy makers, buyers and contract managers, at central and local levels, to implement and enforce requirements that actual and potential suppliers respect human rights throughout their value chains. The public procurement cycle often consists of procurement planning, the procurement process, and contract management. This Toolkit will highlight how requirements that actual and potential suppliers respect human rights can be incorporated across different stages of the procurement cycle. The scope of goods and services bought by public authorities ranges widely, from large-scale infrastructure and urban development projects, to the acquisition of complex items such as weapon systems, to commissioning of essential public services in the health and social care sector, and to buying common goods such as stationery, furniture, and foodstuffs. This Toolkit will highlight how requirements can be integrated into the large majority of procurement exercises. Given variations between national public procurement regimes, this Toolkit outlines a general approach applicable across different legal and market contexts. However, there are likely to be national laws and policies relating to public procurement which may limit some of the general approaches outlined in this toolkit or allow for, and/ or demand, more advanced approaches. Therefore, it is important to tailor the approaches outlined in the toolkit to align with national laws and policies. This Toolkit lays out a range of approaches, from simple to advanced and from easily implementable to demanding (in terms of capacity, knowledge, and budget) and should be tailored to the national context depending on what can realistically be achieved. This Toolkit was published in March 2020. We will now explore the development online training and look for local partners to implement the Toolkit in practice. We envisage that the Toolkit will: - clarify legal requirements and policies related to human rights and public procurement for practitioners and policy makers; - provide guidance and inspiration to practitioners and policy makers to include human rights requirements within public procurement exercises; - ensure coherence so that social element of SPP is aligned with human rights. We are open to collaboration on how to implement this Toolkit in practice to achieve concrete impacts on the ground.