The Workshop also discussed challenges, in particular an impact of WTO agreements on national public procurement market and access of local small and medium enterprises to public contracts.

Speakers invited by the EBRD contributed mainly to the sessions related to the digital governance and electronic procurement. 

In particular, Mihaly Fazekas and Tomas Posepny from the DIGIWHIST project provided an interesting insight to the challenges of the open data and its usage in public procurement markets as well as introduced some solutions for tackling those challenges. 

Examples of using Open Contracting Data Standard in public procurement were presented by Kakhi Demetrashvili and Stefan Condrea, representatives of Georgia and Moldova respectively.  Both speakers emphasised the importance of open data for the enhancement of transparency and competition in public procurement.

Representative of the European Commission (EC) Jachym Hercher presented the current projects in the electronic procurement area where the EC is actively involved. 

On the sidlines of the workshop the participants also celebrated five years of WTO - EBRD cooperation and its extraordinary success: three new GPA accessions (Moldova, Montenegro and Ukraine), one ratification of revised GPA agreement (Armenia), two final GPA offers under discussion (the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan) and FYR Macedonia due to open negotiation process in October 2017.

   
Photo credit: http://wto2017.spa.ge