What Is OCDS? The Open Contracting Data Standard, Explained

Public procurement is one of the largest areas of government spending anywhere in the world — and historically one of the least transparent. Tenders were published as scattered PDFs and notices, in incompatible formats, making it almost impossible to compare opportunities across agencies, let alone across countries. The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) exists to fix that. This article explains what it is, how it works, and why it sits at the heart of how Bidanga operates.

What OCDS is

OCDS is an open, structured data standard for publishing information about public contracting. It is maintained by the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), a non-profit that promotes transparency and efficiency in how governments buy goods, works and services.

In plain terms: OCDS defines a common language for describing a procurement. Instead of every government inventing its own format, OCDS provides an agreed structure — a JSON schema — so that a tender published in Kenya and a tender published in Ghana can be read, compared and analysed in exactly the same way.

How OCDS structures a procurement

The core idea behind OCDS is that a contract is not a single event but a process that unfolds over time. The standard breaks that process into clearly defined stages:

• Planning — the need, budget and rationale for a procurement.
• Tender — the opportunity itself: what is being procured, the requirements, the timeline and the deadline.
• Award — who won, for how much.
• Contract — the signed agreement and its terms.
• Implementation — delivery, milestones and payments.

Each piece of information is published as a release, and all the releases about one procurement are tied together into a record. This staged structure is what makes open contracting data so powerful: you can follow a single project from the first plan to the final payment.

Two ideas that make it work

Two concepts are worth understanding because they appear throughout OCDS data:

The OCID (Open Contracting ID)

Every contracting process gets a unique OCID — an Open Contracting ID. Because each release carries the same OCID, you can reliably link together everything published about one procurement, even when the pieces are released months apart by different systems. On Bidanga, you will see the OCID listed on each tender's detail page.

Releases and records

A release is a snapshot of new information at a point in time ("a tender was published", "an award was made"). A record is the compiled view of all releases for one OCID. Together they let data consumers see both the live updates and the full history of a procurement.

Why OCDS matters

Adopting a common standard has effects that go well beyond tidiness:

• Transparency — citizens, journalists and oversight bodies can see how public money is spent, in a format they can actually analyse.
• Fairer competition — when opportunities are published in a consistent, accessible way, more businesses can find and bid on them, not just well-connected insiders.
• Interoperability — data from different governments and systems can be combined, compared and benchmarked.
• Better tools — because the data is machine-readable, platforms can aggregate, search and alert on it automatically.

That last point is the foundation of what Bidanga does.

How Bidanga uses OCDS

Across Africa, procurement is published on dozens of different national systems, in five working languages and many incompatible formats. Bidanga collects opportunities from these sources and normalises them to OCDS version 1.1.5, the current stable release of the standard.

That normalisation is what makes the rest possible:

• A single search across all 54 African countries, because every tender shares the same structure.
• Consistent filtering by sector, country, value and deadline.
• Reliable alerts, because the data is structured rather than free text.
• Comparable country and sector views, since the same fields mean the same thing everywhere.

In other words, OCDS is the quiet engine under the platform. You experience it as a clean, searchable, continent-wide database — but underneath, it is the open standard that lets data from Lagos, Nairobi, Tunis and Johannesburg sit side by side.

Learn more, or just start searching

If you work in transparency, oversight, data or development, OCDS is worth understanding in its own right — the Open Contracting Partnership publishes the full specification and a growing body of guidance. If you are a supplier, you do not need to master the standard to benefit from it: just search live tenders across Africa, filter to what you do, and let the structure work for you behind the scenes.