USAID Transparent, Effective and Accountable Municipalities (TEAM) activity in Kosovo: Year 5 Annual Work Plan

The project is implemented by DAI Global, LLC (DAI) and subcontractors CiviKos and KPMG. The project aims to improve procurement fairness, transparency, and oversight by providing comprehensive assistance across Kosovo's 38 municipalities to improve accountability for public procurement. At the central level, USAID TEAM is leveraging support for municipal anti-corruption efforts, working with a variety of national-level actors, including the Public Procurement Regulatory Commission (PPRC), National Audit Office (NAO), Ministry of Finance (MoF), Procurement Review Body (PRB), Ministry of Local Government (MLG), Ministry of Public Administration (MPA), and the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA). Civil society also plays a key role in providing oversight and ensuring checks and balances in an anti-corruption watchdog role, exposing corrupt practices and working with citizens and local governments as a partner in the procurement modernization process. The project is partnering with an active network of Kosovar civil society organizations (CSOs), CiviKos, to promote transparency and accountability. This network is educating and engaging citizen groups to identify and report corruption when it occurs in the procurement process—from the municipal to the national level—and is providing sustained pressure to improve transparency and accountability. Activities implemented through USAID TEAM contribute to the Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) Development Objective 1: Improved Rule of Law and Governance that Meet Citizens' Needs. The project directly contributes to two intermediate results (IRs) under this development objective: IR1.2: Strengthened Effectiveness and Accountability of Assemblies, Administrations, and Election Processes, and IR1.4: Civil Society Strengthened to Increasingly Engage Constructively with Government. The project is organized around three main components and a support fund. Component I: Develop, Refine and Roll Out Models for Transparent and Accountable Municipalities, aims to work with 15 municipalities to champion anti-corruption reforms, particularly focusing on procurement. Component II: Engage the Central Level in Addressing Municipal Corruption within the Procurement Process, aims to leverage support for municipal anti-corruption efforts at the central level. Component III: Enable Civil Society to Track and Expose Corruption, aims to work with civil society in monitoring municipal procurement and engaging the public to ensure people are aware of municipal activities. The project has achieved measurable results in the five focus municipalities to-date, including increased capacities of municipal procurement managers on the procurement cycle. In light of these results, USAID TEAM expanded its technical assistance to replicate the successful capacity-building model in up to 10 additional municipalities. The project is expected to continue its efforts to improve procurement fairness, transparency, and oversight, and to strengthen the effectiveness and accountability of municipal administrations and assemblies.