Sunday February 7, 2016
Kabul (BNA) Presided over by President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, the national procurement commission’s session was held the other day at presidential palace. In the session, 41 projects and procurement-related issues of nine ministries and government’s independent institutions were discussed and as a result, 12 contracts costing 1.6 billion AFG were approved, 4 projects rejected and 9 others were referred back to their relevant organs for further reviews and addressing technical problems. Asphalting of 15km-road in Shaberghan city, procuring services affairs of flight check for Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif airports, delivering health preventive services in Balkh, Kandahar, Herat, Badakhshan, Ghazni, Kabul and Kunduz provinces and extending of 120 km of electricity cable in Farah province were among the projects approved by the commission in the session. In the session, most of the projects approved by the commission belonged to MoPH and MoPW and the country’s President while discussing the two ministries’ projects asked for further reforms in human resources’ capacity and their working mechanism. President Ghani instructed officials of the health ministry to take necessary steps towards reforms in procurement and strengthening of procurement capacity at the ministry. The country’s President also instructed officials of ministry for public works to overall review their programs and projects in consultation with the ministry’s donors and codifies a clear program for implementation of projects and their expenses for year 1395.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani stressed that for better maintaining quality and technical plan and implementation of projects the ministry of public works should appoint and set up a powerful overseeing organ. The country’s President while insisting on lowering the price of road projects, producing and making use of high-quality construction materials and mechanism to measure capacity of the international and domestic companies. It is worth mentioning that the national procurement commission has approved nearly 572 contracts costing more than 94.6 billion AFG so far during its 40 continued sessions. The session was attended by second vice president Mohammad Sarwar Danesh, ministers of finance, economy and justice, officials for national procurement authority, representatives of CIGAR and representative of coalition forces to Afghanistan.
