UK aid spending during COVID-19: management of procurement through suppliers

Information note

This information note examines how procurement processes were managed since the cuts, which came late in the year, required rapid changes to be made to existing grants and contracts, and to the pipeline of planned procurement.

It highlights that aid-spending government departments worked flexibly with suppliers to minimise the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work, but lack of transparency about the government’s new aid priorities hampered delivery, and the long-term impact of the cuts to the UK aid programme remains to be seen.

Proposed lines of inquiry

We identified four lines of inquiry that merit further scrutiny:

1. How were programme performance and value for money factored into the prioritisation?
2. Did decisions on which programmes to cut take account of the needs and vulnerabilities of recipient countries and populations?
3. How have interruptions to ongoing aid programmes impacted recipient communities and what should FCDO do to minimise this?
4. Drawing on lessons from DFID’s oversight and relationship management with commercial suppliers, how could FCDO strengthen its engagement with NGOs and other not-for-profit suppliers?