The Organization of American States (OAS), in its role as Technical Secretariat of the INGP, participated in the International Workshop on Public Procurement, held from March 23–26, 2026, in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The OAS extends its sincere appreciation to the Fiscal Management Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (BID) and the Public Procurement Service of the Republic of Korea (PPS) for this valuable exchange.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗱𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽:

📌 Modernizing public procurement requires a comprehensive vision that brings together governance, data, and innovation. It is not only about digitizing processes, but also about leveraging data and artificial intelligence to improve decision-making, strengthen planning, and orient systems toward concrete results in terms of efficiency, transparency, and public value creation.

📌 Korea’s experience demonstrated that systems like KONEPS operate as true digital public infrastructure. Its integration with KOPPEX enables a direct connection between government demand and market supply, facilitating supplier participation, reducing information asymmetries, and fostering more dynamic, transparent, and competitive interactions.

📌 The progress shared by Panama 🇵🇦, Paraguay 🇵🇾, Guatemala 🇬🇹, Colombia 🇨🇴, and Uruguay 🇺🇾 reflects how the region is strengthening key capabilities in digitalization, data analytics, professionalization, and sustainability. These experiences show a growing convergence with the Korean model, particularly in building more integrated, interoperable, and market-oriented systems, adapted to their respective institutional contexts.

📌 Institutional coordination emerged as a critical success factor. Effective alignment between public procurement systems, oversight bodies, and budget authorities helps align priorities, strengthen fiscal discipline, improve the quality of public spending, and enhance transparency and accountability throughout the procurement cycle.

📌 The workshop highlighted the value of international exchange as a driver of collective learning. These spaces enable the identification of good practices, the comparison of approaches, and the acceleration of reform processes, demonstrating that, despite different contexts, there are shared principles that can guide the transformation of public procurement systems.

📌 Finally, the OAS presented regional progress on professionalization and introduced the study “Professionalization of the Public Buyer as a Driver of Public Procurement System Performance: Comparative Analysis and Toolkit.” This diagnostic, based on data from 15 LAC countries, highlights both significant progress and persistent structural gaps, and puts forward a set of essential actions to consolidate public procurement as a strategic function of the State. This Study will be available in English, soon.