On February 25-27, 2019 during a meeting of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Committee on Government Procurement Ukraine, for the first time in the history of its membership in the WTO, was elected as a Chairman of the Work Program on Collection and Reporting of Statistical Data. This became possible due to Ukraine's significant achievements in this field over the recent years. The previous chairman of this program was the United States.

In 2016 Ukraine became a party to the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). As a result, Ukrainian companies gained a right to take part in government procuremenof 47 countries-parties to the GPA, including the countries of the European Union, Japan, U.S. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada. The total volume of the government procurement market of the WTO is estimated at $ 1.7 trillion annually.

The Ukrainian delegation expressed its gratitude for the trust and outlined the main directions of work for the near future, in particular, development and use of a unified methodology for collecting and reporting data on public procurement data of member states of the Government Procurement Agreement, as well as the further expansion of the use of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)  in the field of public procurement of the Organization for International Economic Cooperation.

Ukraine has a clear position on the feasibility of using the OCDS standard by the member states of the Agreement, which will significantly increase the transparency and openness of information on public procurement in the world. Using this standard allows you to publish readable data, combine and compare them with your own information, and create tools for analyzing and sharing data on the state of public procurement in individual countries and the world as a whole. As part of the meeting of the Committee, Ukraine has confirmed its readiness to share its experience in applying the OCDS standard.

The ProZorro e-procurement system, which uses this data standard, is an example of how open data ensures transparency in public procurement, has a positive impact on the development of the economy, reduces the level of corruption and shapes the positive international image of Ukraine. The openness of data greatly limits the possibilities for shadow wchemes and makes violations when making purchases more risky from the point of view of the law.

"Today ProZorro system is unique not only for Ukraine but also for the world, a system where 2.26 million of all purchases can be monitored online. These are all purchases for the entire time of the existence of the system, where all the information from the tender to the signing and execution of the contract on them is transparent. Each day this quantity increases by an average of 4-5 thousand procedures. The total budget of procurements announced in the system for its entire existence already amounts to UAH 2.16 trillion," Maxim Nefyodov, First Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade stressed, commenting on the importance of using open data for procurement procedures.