Each year, bilateral and multilateral donors contract out tens of billions of dollars in grants and loans translating into thousands of procurement opportunities for services, equipment and goods. Due to this high overall volume, as well as the wide range of funding sources out there, tracking business leads and opportunities in international development is a complex task.
Despite credible donor efforts to simplify their universe of procurement information, ask any Devex analyst and he or she will tell you that effectively navigating some donor websites takes months, if not years, of practice. Even after a procurement opportunity is identified and vetted, implementing organizations face incredibly stringent bidding standards and rules that further complicates an already challenging task for business development professionals.
But at the end of the day, tracking procurement opportunities is a daunting job that must be done and implementing organizations are still experimenting with different approaches. Depending on company size, positioning in the marketplace and business development sophistication, among other factors, some firms stick to old-fashioned tactics such as searching individual donor sites and managing leads with spreadsheets or emails. Others are more ambitious and invest in custom or off-the-shelf technology solutions. Unfortunately, neither approach is ideal and both can entail substantial costs.