Education monitoring group calls for greater transparency in DepEd procurement process
MANILA, Philippines — Recent controversies in the Department of Education’s purchases of laptops show that government mechanisms to stop corruption are “no longer enough,” a group of government accountability advocates said Monday.
Multiply-Ed, a project that monitors education governance and spending, said that the “anomalous contracts” the DepEd entered in 2021 involving devices needed for distance learning demonstrate the need for greater transparency in the government’s procurement process, including a revamp of the country’s procurement laws.
“The recent anomalous contracts demonstrate that the transparency, participation and accountability mechanisms in government procurement are no longer enough to stop corruption,” Multiply-Ed said in a statement.
The group added that generally, current anti-corruption mechanisms are “supply-dependent” or “government-led,” leaving it up to the government agency itself to determine whether it will allow the mechanisms to work.
Since it began engaging DepEd on procurement and bidding activities in 2022, the group said the department had shown relative openness to being monitored for transparency.
However, there are still “critical processes and offices that are not open to monitoring,” with some information still “selectively accessible,” according to Multiply-Ed’s initial engagements with DepEd.
Out of the 11 procurement items it has monitored, Multiply-Ed said it could only observe until the opening of bids and was not informed of the actual awarding of contracts and project implementations that followed.
Monitoring of this scale would “(require) a lot of capacity-building and resources for civil society” due to “the government's selective transparency and obscure commitments,” the group said.
Procurement system revamp needed
Multiply-Ed has also called for an urgent review of the government’s procurement laws and emphasized the need to reassess the government’s procurement system, including the personnel typically involved.
The youth group, which has met with DepEd and local officials to improve education governance, also highlighted the need for the Government Procurement Policy Board to “reclaim its role of protecting and ensuring that the reforms in procurement."
DepEd faced scrutiny at the Senate late last year for purchasing allegedly overpriced laptops, with the powerful Senate Blue Committee eventually recommending administrative and criminal complaints against officials who signed off on the purchase.
Multiply-Ed said it was “unfortunate” that distance learning devices like laptops were part of the allegedly anomalous deals as these were badly needed by schools for blended learning.
Its own monitoring covering 53 schools in 10 divisions showed 17% of students, 22% of teachers, and 17% of parents experienced a “a lack of access to learning resources, including gadgets needed for distance learning.”
Months before classes began in 2020, DepEd found in a nationwide enrollment survey that 6.8 million parents did not have access to gadgets or devices for distance learning. Nearly 9 million said they preferred using printed modules, dwarfing the 3 million who favored online learning.
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