GovTech Procurement in Africa: Why the Model Is Broken and How to Fix It

The graveyard of failed government technology projects in Africa is large and growing. From ambitious integrated financial management systems that took a decade to implement and still don't work as designed, to national health information systems that collapsed after pilot, to digital identity platforms that excluded the populations they were meant to serve — the pattern of GovTech failure is consistent enough to suggest that the problem is systemic, not accidental.

The technology itself is rarely the primary cause of failure. The culprit, in most cases, is the procurement model — the set of processes, incentives, and institutional arrangements through which governments decide what to buy, from whom, at what price, and under what conditions.

What Is Wrong with Current GovTech Procurement

Several interconnected pathologies characterise dysfunctional GovTech procurement in the African context. First, the waterfall procurement cycle: requirements are fixed at the beginning of a long procurement process, which then runs for 18-36 months before any technology is delivered. By the time delivery occurs, the requirements have changed, the technology landscape has evolved, and the officials who understood the original requirements have moved on. The result is a system built for yesterday's problem at tomorrow's price.

Second, vendor lock-in: public sector technology contracts are often written in ways that create proprietary dependencies — custom integrations, non-standard data formats, support contracts that only the original vendor can fulfil — that make switching vendors prohibitively expensive. Governments find themselves trapped in relationships with vendors that have little incentive to perform.

Third, capacity asymmetry: the technology industry employs skilled professionals whose job is to win government contracts; government procurement teams are typically under-resourced, under-trained, and under-incentivised. The result is predictable: governments routinely agree to contracts that serve vendor interests over public interests.

Elements of a Reform Agenda

A reformed GovTech procurement model for Africa would include: agile procurement frameworks that allow iterative delivery and adjustment as requirements evolve; digital marketplace platforms that aggregate government demand and create competitive pressure; open standards requirements that prevent proprietary lock-in; in-house technical capacity to write and evaluate technology specifications; and performance-based contracting that ties payment to demonstrated outcomes rather than delivered features.

Several African governments — Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana — are already experimenting with elements of this reform agenda. The evidence from these experiments is encouraging, and the models are ready to be adopted and adapted more widely.