Asian Development Bank
Sustainable Procurement Strategy Peer Review and TrainingÂ
Asian Development Bank (ADB) wants to use its influence as a major financer of infrastructure projects to advance a host of sustainability objectives as articulated in their ADB 2030 Strategy. Part of their success will be helping their clients effectively apply sustainable procurement principles within the bidding and contracting phases of various projects. To effectively play this role, ADB needed to address a skills and knowledge gap that existed within their staff related to leading practices in sustainable procurement. Reeve Consulting was retained to create tools and training programs to help develop confidence with their internal staff, contractors, and stakeholders to integrate sustainability into procurement processes and decisions.
In phase 1 of the project, ADB had an internal Strategic Procurement Planning Guide, but needed advisory services to review the document for quality assurance. Reeve played an expert advisor role to ensure the Guidance document was customized and effectively presented.
In phase 2, ADB determined the need for staff to be confident in identifying sustainability risks and assessments in project supply chains. Staff, contractors, and stakeholders mentioned that their most common barriers to integrating sustainability into their procurement process was lack of time and understanding of how to introduce sustainability criteria into the project.
After revision of the document, Reeve was chosen by ADB to host a series of virtual and in-person training sessions for ADB staff, contractors and external stakeholders in Jakarta and Manila. The goal of these training sessions is to support on-going learning, specifically in behavior change to embed sustainability in their project procurement process. A series of tools were used to deliver these sessions from e-learning modules, and webinars, to in-person workshops, case studies and seminars.
The learning sessions were broken up into 6 courses to target the appropriate.
Courses included:
- E-Learning Materials
- Basic Procurement Course
- Comprehensive Sustainable Procurement Course
- Project-Specific Sustainable Procurement Training
- Executive and Management Level Sustainable Procurement Briefing
- Market Facing Course
Reeve performed pre- and post-training learning assessment to measure the effectiveness of achieving learner desired outcomes. Groups that receiving training became well-oriented with the process of integrating sustainability into the planning process of large infrastructure projects, from conducting sustainability risk assessments to translating risks and opportunities into purchasing criteria. The ADB learning group is now well equipped to incorporate meaningful sustainable procurement decisions to improve economic development within Southeast Asia.
Next steps: Reeve is excited to continue this work with ADB in 2023 with plans for full scale deployment of the Sustainable Procurement processes and procedures. We are excited to see ADB continue the Sustainable Procurement movement across Southeast Asia!