Construction Tenders in Africa: Where to Find Them in 2026

What a construction tender covers

A construction tender is a call from a public buyer for bids to build, rehabilitate or maintain physical works: roads and bridges, water and sanitation networks, power lines, schools, health facilities and public buildings. In French-speaking countries you will often see these notices labelled BTP (bâtiment et travaux publics). On Bidanga, they are grouped on the construction sector page. The site aggregates public tenders from 54 African countries, published in the OCDS open data format and updated every day.

Many guides open by saying that construction takes the largest share of public spending in Africa. We do not repeat that claim, because we have not found an official figure that covers the whole continent. What the sector page shows instead is the current list of open construction notices and the countries publishing them, with search and filters. That is a better guide to real activity than an unsourced ratio.

The page is also useful if you are not a contractor. Engineering consultants, supervising engineers and suppliers of materials or equipment can search it for the notices that match their trade, with keywords such as “supervision”, “design” or “bitumen”.

Where to look, country by country

This guide does not rank the “most active” construction markets. Tender volumes change every day, and a fixed list would be wrong within weeks. Each country page shows its open notices, which you can narrow to construction. Some starting points, with our country guides where they exist:

• Nigeria, with our guide to online tenders in Nigeria.
• South Africa, with our guide to tenders in South Africa.
• Kenya, with our guide to tenders in Kenya.
• Egypt, with our article on building project tenders in Egypt.
• Ethiopia, with our guide to tenders in Ethiopia.
• Morocco, with our guide to public procurement in Morocco (in French).

For other French-speaking markets such as Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire or Cameroon, see our guide to tenders in French-speaking Africa. To trace notices back to the official portals, use our list of government procurement websites by country.

Who funds the projects

Before anything else, check whether the notice states a source of financing: a national or local budget, or a loan or grant from a development bank. That line tells you which texts to read and whom to ask.

For projects financed by the World Bank through Investment Project Financing (IPF), the World Bank states on its Procurement Framework page (accessed 22 October 2026) that the “Procurement Regulations for Investment Project Financing (IPF) Borrowers (September 2025)” are among the requirements governing “the procurement of Goods, Works, Non-Consulting Services, and Consulting Services for IPF operations”. The full text is in the Procurement Regulations, seventh edition. The World Bank lists notices for these projects on its Procurement Notices page, which offers email alerts. See also our guide to World Bank tenders in Africa.

The African Development Bank publishes its own procurement policy for the operations it funds, the Politique de passation des marchés des opérations financées par le Groupe de la Banque (French version). For a specific AfDB-financed notice, send your questions to the contact given in the notice.

For works paid from a national budget, start from the country's public procurement regulator and official portal, listed in our guide to government procurement websites by country.

Qualifying to bid: two countries we checked

The two examples below come from texts we checked. They apply only to the country named and say nothing about the others.

South Africa. Under section 18(1) of the Construction Industry Development Board Act 38 of 2000 (official text on gov.za; section 18 on Acts Online), a contractor may not undertake, carry out or complete construction works for public sector contracts awarded by competitive tender or quotation unless the contractor is registered with the Board and holds a valid registration certificate. For a firm's registration or grading, contact the Construction Industry Development Board (cidb.org.za). For the public procurement framework, see National Treasury (treasury.gov.za). For a specific notice, contact the buyer named in it.

Kenya. The National Construction Authority Act (No. 41 of 2011), text on Kenya Law, has a Part III headed “Trading as a contractor”, whose section 15 is titled “Requirement for registration”. Read that section, then confirm registration categories with the National Construction Authority (nca.go.ke). For the tender process itself, the regulator is the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (ppra.go.ke).

In every case, read the qualification section of the notice and the bidding document before you price anything, and answer these questions:

• Which registration, licence or grade does the document ask for?
• What turnover, similar past contracts, staff and equipment must you prove?
• Does it ask for a bid security or a bid-securing declaration, and in what form?
• Is a source of financing stated, and does it point to a financier's rules?

How to track construction tenders efficiently

Construction notices come from national buyers, local governments and projects financed by development banks. Watching several of them by hand quickly becomes unmanageable. A five-step method:

1. Define your delivery footprint: the countries, project types and contract sizes you can realistically take on.
2. Search one source: the construction sector page brings together notices from every country Bidanga covers, with country filters.
3. Set alerts so you hear about a matching notice when it is published, not in the week it closes.
4. Qualify early: check the registration, capacity and guarantees the document asks for before you commit time to a bid.
5. Go back to the official source: before you submit, check the deadline, the amount and the required documents in the buyer's own documents.

Our explainer on OCDS open data describes the format that makes it possible to bring these notices together.

Start where you build

If you already know your markets, go to the country pages, for example Nigeria, South Africa or Kenya, and filter by construction. If you would rather scan the whole continent, start from the construction sector page and narrow down by country. Either way, the decision to bid is made on the buyer's official documents, not on a summary.