Question

Identify and provide solutions to five engineering ethical issues that are relevant to Infrastructural development in Africa today.

Answer 1

Follwing are the Key ethical issues that are relevant in Africa. Common across the globe also.

Collusive bidding- There are many steps that procurement agencies can take to promote more effective competition in public procurement and reduce the risk of Collusive bidding. Procurement agencies should consider adopting the following measures:

1. Be informed about the Collusive bidding before designing the tender process

2. Involve more direct procurement items with a base price

3. Design the tender process to maximise the potential participation of genuinely competing bidders

4. Define your requirements clearly including performance specification and criteria and avoid predictability

5. Reduce communication among bidders

6. Carefully choose your criteria for evaluating and awarding the tender

7. Use different procurement model and tendering process for each project.

8. Use the Eternal agency for bid management alone.

9. Raise awareness among your staff about the risks of collusive bidding in procurement

Bribery- It is common phenomena across the globe which can be avoided by making strict anti- bribery policy and implementing it strongly against the non-adherence, creating awareness among the people involved in the project, signing a bond for anti- bribery policy, making it known to all concerned if any bribe offered, Having strict periodical vigilance by external agency etc.       

Negligence - Negligence is mainly due to non-involvement and non- accountability. All the members of the project team to be made involved in the project and there should be strict monitoring of individual accountability. Periodic monitoring, reviewing, checking etc can avoid the negligence. One need to create awareness on the impact of negligence and people who responsible should be accounted accordingly. Prepare proper checklists, ensure and monitor every activity as per check list to avoid common mistakes. The list of common repeated mistakes to be prepared and circulated with proper action plan. Keep supervising all the activities on and often .       

Fraud, dishonesty – There should be detailed action plan to handle fraud and dishonest practices. Awareness programme on fraud practices to be conducted with past examples. Tarin people to identify the possible fraud and take necessary action. Keep strict vigilance and periodic auditing of the activities by an external agency (may be different agency for each project) to identify and highlight the wrong doings. There should be proper legal procedure to punish the fraudulent practice and dishonest people. Identify the area where the fraudulent practice can happen and keep competent person for supervising it.         

Unfair practices – The Contract should be drafted in such a way that there is should be no chance for unfair practices. Keep using international standard practice to avoid local unfair practice. Educate people what is the right practice and encourage to follow it. People with unfair practice to be listed and discouraged. Proper unbiased facilities to be provided to each individual so that they should not think of getting into unfair practice to take some advantage. There should not be any discrimination within the project community which lead to unfair practices.