On Tuesday, June 4th, we held a meeting with journalists who are part of our informal network of media friends. We established this network back in 2018 and have since expanded it in order to jointly work on strengthening our capacity to research and deal with public finances, including public procurement.
The specific goal of this project was to improve the quality of media reporting on public procurement, which is why we engaged media friends to design and produce video stories, investigative articles on public procurement in various fields, and prepare a special TV programmes on public procurement. The meeting also provided an opportunity to discuss our past cooperation and its continuation.
The key reason for the meeting was to present the new section of the mojnovac.me portal related to public procurement. This portal serves as a tool that can be of great benefit to journalists in researching and dealing with public procurement, as it represents an easily searchable database of public procurements for the past three years. This database allows us to see who receives money through public procurements, with whom the state most frequently concludes contracts, and which companies have received money for goods, services, and works over the past three years.
During the meeting, journalists emphasised that this portal will be of great importance for their further work in investigating public procurement.
The meeting was organised as part of the project “Public Procurement Under Spotlight – Making Watchdogs Work!”, which we are implementing with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Serbia and Montenegro through the MATRA support program. The project aims to empower and motivate budget guardians to fight against corruption and inappropriate influences in public procurement.
