I can't remember how long I have been with Transparency International Ukraine, and DOZORRO has been in my heart a little less than 6 years.

Prior to the public sector, I worked with tenders as aprocuring entity. I never thought public procurement would stay with me for so long.

People don't seem to notice much, but procurement surrounds us everywhere. In the subway or on the bus, in the street or at home, at school, in the hospital. The state buys something for the public good everyday — so that we are in comfort.

I have always been interested in understanding the whole state process, from money planning to a specific result. And now I have the opportunity not only to understand it, but also together with DOZORRO to implement qualitative changes in a part of this process — the sphere of procurement. 

We influence the sphere of procurement with daily work, which may not be immediately noticeable:we analyze draft laws, write analytics, conduct trainings.

During our work, the team, together with the entireDOZORRO community, sent more than 30,000 such letters. Due to this, procuring entities made changes to the terms of tenders, terminated contracts, and inmore than 60 cases, law enforcement officers opened criminal proceedings.

This is a direct contribution to the development of afair and efficient procurement sphere, to which we all aspire.

My task in DOZORRO is to make sure that as many people as possible learn about our work and about fair rules of the game in public procurement so that they also want to work with it a little. Therefore, together with Lera, we are engaged in the communications of the project.

My favorite part of the work is the one related to legislation.

DOZORRO tracks draft laws, resolutions, and other acts that affect the work of Prozorro. We make sure that everything is okay there,and we propose changes to improve the sphere. 

And I also love it when we avert some harmful idea. At such moments, the value of your work is especially palpable because unless the team fought, there would be much more corruption risks and problems in public procurement. 

For example, once, MPs almost canceled simplified procurement — a facilitated version of open bidding that is used in peacetime for smaller amounts to grant the business wider access to procurement. We made sure that this draft law was withdrawn from consideration, and instead provided recommendations on what to improve insimplified procurement to make it even more convenient. By the way, we base ouradvice on analytics and research, so that innovations are really useful and reasonable. 

In short, I love everything legislative. Comparative tables, committees, broadcasts of meetings of the Verkhovna Rada… Mmm, that's it!

In the past three years alone, we have processed morethan 70 legislative initiatives: draft laws, resolutions, orders, and othe rdocuments.

My cooperation with DOZORRO began on August 1, 2016 — the day that the Prozorro system became mandatory for all procuringentities.

Since then, the team and I have been tracking how the various procurement processes work, studying data, and showing them in the module as easily as possible. We constantly ask users what more filters, columns, and charts they need to adapt the module to their real needs. And in addition, we teach everyone who wants to use BI Prozorro.

All this is to ensure that all stakeholders in the field of public procurement can make effective decisions as quickly as possible.

I like that thanks to our work, procurement data come to life.

If you also have questions that can be answered by public procurement data, then we invite you to get acquainted with our analytics module. There, you can not only learn to analyze data quickly and efficiently, but also see dozens of different examples of their application.

Since mid-April 2017, more than 300,000 people havebenefited from public BI Prozorro.

I have been with DOZORRO for almost 3 years. During this time, we have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, the entry into force of the new version of the Law “On Public Procurement”, the fight against localization, and the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It seems to be the most serious and longest relationship of my life. I hope this love is mutual.

Almost all DOZORRO texts pass through me, and I also manage the social networks of the project together with my colleague Katya. If you need a comment from one of our team members, you need to come to me. You want to do some cool communications campaign on social networks together with DOZORRO — me as well.

I believe that public procurement is a veryinteresting and important topic. And I want more people to think so, too. 

Then I realized that even though we don't communicate some of our products to a super wide audience, they can be very useful to decision-makers. For example, the fact that auditors cover fewer than 2% of tenders with monitoring does not tell my mother anything. But for the Ministry of Economy, this means that public procurement is very poorly controlled. And that's a problem. Which must be solved.

Another our study of the appeal showed that procuring entities often cancel tenders and announce them again in order not to comply with the decisions of the Anti-Monopoly Committee. After a while, they were forbidden to do so at the level of the law.

A total of 17 studies have been published by DOZORRO in 6 years. All of them can be read on the TI Ukraine website in the research sectionon public procurement.

I have been working in DOZORRO for more than 3 years — since July 2019. Here I analyze tenders: I ensure that procuring entities and participants adhere to equal rules of the game, and supervisory and law enforcement agencies bring violators to justice. Recently, I have been constantly sending our letters with information about violations. 

What I like most about our work is that we are trusted.

In social networks and by email, people constantly send cases with violations and a request to analyze them. And sometimes we are even used to scare others — “if the violation is noteliminated, we will contact DOZORRO.”

I also like to study data from Prozorro and make small analytical materials based on them. One of my favorite texts is the price analysis of medical masks in Prozorro during the COVID-19 pandemic. To be more precise, it was a series of texts. We monitored PPE prices for over a year, spent a hundred hours digitizing the price for each concluded contract. This allowed us to track the dynamics, the trend in the public procurement market, quickly identify procurement transactions where there were significant overpayments, and once again prove that competition in Prozorro brings prosperity. 

Over the past six years, we have published more than 5,000 blogs, analytics, and news.

In December of this year, it will be my little anniversary of working at DOZORRO — 5 years. I started with a small project where regional specialists and I helped procuring entities conduct tenders. And then dived into the search for violations. It was then that I realized that sometimes buyers violate not because of malicious intent — but simply because they do not understand the law well and/or have a large workload and staff turnover in their institution.

In general, my main idea is to work ahead of the curve. Not to wait for violations, but to help procuring entities and businesses act within the framework of the law.

And of course, the work of the State Audit Service. For two years, I analyzed the appeals of monitoring and developed several studies on this type of screening the procuring entity. The conclusion is that there is also a lot to work on, not only for procuring entities and participants, but also for supervisory bodies to ensure that the public procurement sphere works efficiently and coherently. 

I joined the DOZORRO team a fewmonths ago, but in fact our cooperation is longer — my own project “Railway without corruption” tracked the tenders of Ukrzaliznytsia and was part of the DOZORRO community.

Now I am responsible for a new direction — monitoring the reconstruction of Ukraine. After the victory, we will face a difficult test — to build a new country, and to do it withoutcorruption and abuse. Success in this direction depends on how we prepare for rebuilding now. Which laws we will adopt and which way we will follow. 

There are many open questions in this topic, and it is frankly difficult to find optimal solutions. But this is an interesting and dynamic process. 

Most of all, I like to ask these difficult questions and look for answers to them. The public must do so. This is not just a task for the authorities. 

DOZORRO and I means a 6-year relationship. During this time, I have tried different roles, but one thing has always remained stable — helping all players in the field of procurement. I monitored procurement, identified errors and violations in them, advised procuring entities and participants on how to better eliminate or prevent procurement problems. 

Almost 900 people registered for online training on how to use the public analytics module. And people continue to come to train even during the full-scale war. We also continue to hold webinars — there have been 5 of them recently. 

I joined the project in November 2020, and from the very first day I was trying to understand what this ProBI Prozorro module was.

I developed training programs on this tool and conducted them for stakeholders: the Accounting Chamber, central executive authorities, local governments, procuring entities. Some of our students then began to learn analytics, programming languages, and data analysis approaches. 

I believe we are doing magic.

Whether changes to the law are effective — look in the module, whether hospitals have begun to buy more accordions — look in the module. Where are the coolest procuring entities, who is the largest supplier, where is it better to buy paper, masks, sticks, catering, or blood products? Why are contracts terminated? Which of the participants goes to all the tenders in a pair? All of this is in the module. And I'm sure it'll only get cooler.

DOZORRO and I have been together for 3 years, but they were so eventful that it feels like many more. The international component ofthe project is my responsibility. I deal with grants and their reports, communication with our colleagues from other countries, and help promote our analytical tools and achievements in the world.