Addis Abeba Orders Its Big Spenders Off Paper

Jul 4 , 2026. By NAHOM AYELE ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

The digital requirement includes major entities such as the Revenue Bureau, the Housing Development Corporation, and large district administrations, including Qirkos and Lideta. Addis Abeba's network includes 217 public administrative structures, 87 sectoral bureaus, 11 district administrations, and 119 woredas. The current integration of 48 agencies is the first phase of a broader plan to migrate every public procurement activity in the capital to the eGP platform within five years.

The Addis Abeba City Administration has ordered its 48 largest-spending agencies to stop buying on paper, which comprises 22pc of the city administrative units.

From July 8, the start of the new fiscal year, the city's high-volume procuring entities will have to run every purchase through the Electronic Government Procurement (eGP) platform, abandoning the manual tenders that officials say have long been a channel for waste and graft.

The mandate is the boldest test yet of whether a piece of software can do what oversight has struggled to, close the loopholes of manual buying. It arrives as the capital prepares to spend more public money than ever before.

Manual tenders have long carried a reputation for favouring the connected and hiding the trail. Mayor Adanech Abiebie's Administration is wagering that forcing every transaction onto a screen will leave less room for deals struck off-screen.

The order comes from the city's Finance Bureau, headed by Abdulkadir Redwan. A letter signed by the Bureau's Deputy Head, Yoseph Tale, informed the 48 bureau heads that the groundwork laid during the closing fiscal year had left them ready to migrate, and instructed them to discontinue manual procurement immediately and conduct all future purchases through the eGP system.

Officials frame the shift as a drive to cut financial waste, tighten budget discipline and curb the corrupt practices long associated with conventional procurement. The institutions were chosen for the scale of their spending and their technological readiness.

The reach is substantial. The Revenue Bureau under Biniyam Mikiru; the Land Development & Administration Bureau under Mekonen Yaie; the Fire & Disaster Risk Management Commission led by Ahmed Mohammed (Commissioner); the Housing Development Corporation headed by Thomas Debele (Eng.); and, the Civil Registration & Residency Service Agency under Yosef Nigusie are included in the new requirement. Several district administrations, among them Qirkos, Lideta, Addis Ketema and Nifas Silk-Lafto, are also folded in.

Addis Abeba runs 217 public administrative structures, 87 sectoral bureaus, 11 district administrations and 119 woredas. The directive marks a sharp expansion of digital procurement across the Administration. Until recently, only 13 city agencies, including the Mayor's Office, had been buying through the platform.

The city Administration allocated 174.2 billion Br, 75.6pc of the total budget, to sectoral offices in the 2024/25 fiscal year. Construction received the largest single allocation under capital expenditure, with 38.7 billion Br. Water and sewerage followed with 18.3 billion Br, while education was allocated 18 billion Br.

Road development and health were the next-largest spending areas, at 17.9 billion Br and 12 billion Br, respectively.

The eGP platform is a nationally developed system that manages the full procurement cycle, letting an institution plan, announce, evaluate and award a contract in centralised place. When an agency wants to buy goods or services, it posts the notice online, and suppliers download the tender documents, submit bids electronically and take part remotely, without carrying paper to a counter.

City officials say that widens competition to firms across the country while trimming administrative cost.

The approach is not new to government. The federal state adopted eGP several years ago, and the overwhelming majority of federal purchases now run through it. The platform was built by Perago Information Systems Plc, an Addis Abeba based technology company founded in 2013 that supplies source-to-pay systems, including electronic procurement and invoicing, to governments and large firms.

Perago built the federal platform before customising a version for the city, though that version, completed nearly two years ago, has come into use only in parts. The directive is, in effect, an order to close that gap. A tool built and paid for two years ago has sat only half-used, and the city Administration is now compelling its heaviest spenders to switch it fully on.

The case for the change rests on money and integrity. According to Petros Seyoum, head of the eGP Project Office, widening the system should improve budget efficiency while narrowing the room for corruption.

“Studies of electronic procurement show institutions saving between five percent and 25pc of their procurement budgets once they adopt it,” Petros told Fortune. "It also widens supplier participation. Instead of relying on a limited number of bidders, institutions receive offers from many suppliers, giving them greater choice and stronger competition."

He argued that moving procurement online strips out many of the openings for graft that manual systems leave.

"When procurement is conducted electronically, many of the loopholes associated with manual processes disappear," he said. "E-GP is a preferable system."

However, he acknowledged that the migration has met resistance to change, limited digital literacy among procurement staff and gaps in technological infrastructure.

The decision to go fully digital comes as the City Administration prepares its largest budget to date, a 502 billion Br bill for 2026/27 fiscal year approved by the City Cabinet, which lifts spending on infrastructure and social services while promising firmer financial management.

The city, previously left out of federal subsidy arrangements, has been folded back into the funding framework, though its allocation stays modest, at less than a quarter of a billion Birr. Under the approved budget, 71pc of spending is earmarked for poverty-reduction programmes and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including roads, housing, water and subsidised health and education for low-income residents.

City officials see wider electronic procurement as central to spending that far larger budget cleanly and to account for every Birr of it.

Procurement specialists have welcomed the decision.

Gebeyaw Yitayih, a former staff member of the Federal Public Procurement & Property Authority, called it an "encouraging move" toward modern public purchasing.

“The transition makes public spending transparent and open to every qualified supplier, rather than the narrow circles that manual tenders often serve,” he said. “It also lightens the load on business, sparing bidders the cost of travelling to collect documents and file proposals, and the outlays on transport, fuel and printing that come with them.”

The gains, he believes, run in two directions. A larger pool of bidders lets institutions compare more competitive offers, raising the odds of better prices and higher-quality works bought with public money. And unlike paper files, which can be lost, altered or manipulated, an electronic system leaves a permanent record that auditors can review at every stage.

"It limits situations where procurement opportunities are known only to a few individuals or companies," Gebeyaw said. "Instead, every qualified supplier can bid on equal terms without requiring personal connections."

Yet he cautioned that technology alone cannot carry the result. Drawing on the federal rollout, he warned that weak digital literacy and shaky infrastructure remain the biggest obstacles to wider use.

"The city Administration should focus on building robust infrastructure to support the system," he said. "Experience at the federal level showed that high traffic occasionally caused the platform to slow down or disconnect."

Tenders for construction works, which require bidders to move unusually large technical files, strain it further, and success will depend as much on training procurement staff as on the software itself. The mandate can compel institutions to log on, but not, on its own, teach thousands of officials to run the system or guarantee the bandwidth to keep it up and running.

City officials appear undeterred. According to Petros, the long-term plan is to migrate all public procurement activities in the capital to the eGP platform within five years, one of the most ambitious public-sector digital projects the city has attempted to date.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 04,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1366]