Data User Guide - Office of the Chief Procurement Officer eTender Portal

1. Purpose of Publication

The publication of procurement data at data.etenders.gov.za aims to ensure that public procurement data used by the National Treasury of South Africa is accessible online and in open formats, so that it can be used, reused and redistributed by any interested party.

2. Uses of the data

The National Treausry of South Africa has committed to use open contracting data to create a more transparent procurement system and one that is less vulnerable to corruption. Open and standardised data helps to create fairer competition and a level playing field - including for preferential procurement policies. It also delivers better value-for-money and better quality jobs and services, ensuring greater service delivery from the government.

3. Publication Details

1. OCID generation

The eTender and transparency portals make use of the OCID - a unique global identifier for a contracting process.

National Treasury makes use of the ocds-9t57fa as the prefix and the field 'ocid'. The prefix was registered on 9 February 2022.

3. Accessing the data

The National Treasury’s procurement data is available at: https://data.entenders.gov.za. The portal has visualisations and a search function, allowing users to search using the fields, ProcurementCategory & Buyer.

National Treasury makes the data available in the following formats:

The National Treasury previously published data relating to procurement plans, tender advertisements, and the award of contracts, on the eTender portal in PDF and Excel formats. OCDS data is now the primary format for all OCPO data publication, and this documentation demonstrates how the historical data was mapped to OCDS.

The data that is published on eTender does not constitute a complete record of all procurement processes in South Africa: it represents the procurement data shared with National Treasury by entities in all spheres of government. The primary source of the data is tenders, procurement plans, awards and contracts published or captured via the eTender portal. Any tenders, procurement plans, awards and contracts published or captured via eTender portal are automatically made available via the transparency porta. There is no obligation on municipal governments and state owned entities to share procurement data with National Treasury.

4. Data Scope

5. Exclusions and Omissions

The scope of the data published on the transparency portal is drawn from applicable procurement legislation and its obligations placed on procuring entities to share procurement data with the National Treasury. The scope is limited to the data, in fact, shared with the National Treasury.

The publication of data on the transparency portal is fully compliant with the Promotion of Personal Information Act (POPIA). As such, any personal information, as defined in POPIA, related to bidders or contractors for which publication has not been consented is not published.

6. Codes, Codelist and Extensions used in Publication

7. Contact and Responsibility

The OCPO Unit in the National Treasury is responsible for the publication of data on the eTender and transparency portals.

Please send any feedback or questions to cpo@treasury.gov.za.

8. License

National Treasury has licensed the data which allows a user of the data to:

• Use this data for any purpose including commercial and non-commercial use
• Publish content based on the use of this data
• Re-publish this data providing a link to the original source remains intact

9. Disclaimer

Access to the portal does not imply that the National Treasury has verified the veracity, accuracy, adequacy, suitability, completeness and timeliness of the information provided through our site. The procurement data provided by National Treasury on the portal comprises data provided by procuring entities to National Treasury and National Treasury cannot guarantee that the data provided by the procuring entities is up-to-date and complete.

The publication of the data on the portal constitutes a faithful and complete compilation of the document issued by the procuring entity to National Treasury, without additions, deletions or corrections of any nature.

National Treasury is not responsible for decisions taken from the information published on the portal or for possible damages caused to the visiting user or third parties due to actions that are based solely on the information obtained on the site

National Treasury may carry out, at any time and without prior notice, modifications and updates on the information contained on the transparency portal, its configuration or presentation.

10. Data Quality

Data publication, bulk downloads via CSV, JSON and XLSX files, APIs and the published indicators are currently in public beta testing phase. The data is derived from disparate data sets. As a result, the information is not guaranteed to be accurate in all instances and must not be used for any critical decision making or legal purposes. National Treasury along with its partners is working continuously to improve the data quality and this will be reflected in future releases.