Center for Continuing Education in Gaza Holds Two Workshops

The Birzeit University Center for Continuing Education organized on 17-22 May 2015 in Gaza City, two workshops entitled "Public Procurement as an opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses." This comes as part of the project “capacity building of small and medium-sized companies in public procurement,” implemented in cooperation with the Supreme Council for Public Policy and funded by the World Bank.

The first workshop targeted contractors and the second targeted engineers, while the duration of each workshop was two days, each covering 12 training hours, and were attended by more than 40 participants.

The aim of the training workshops is to enhance the competitiveness of small and medium-sized local companies that wish to participate in public procurement tenders.

It is worth noting that more than 90% of Palestinian businesses are small and medium-sized companies. However, so far the participation of small and medium-sized companies in bidding for public procurement has been very limited. Recent studies have indicated that there are several reasons why the small and medium-sized companies have not participated in public procurement tenders, most notably: the lack of knowledge available to them in public procurement, and lack of transparency in public procurement procedures.