By Only 11 of Nigeria’s 36 states, or 30.6%, maintained an active e-procurement portal with updated contract information in the first quarter of 2026, according to the States Fiscal Transparency League (SFTL) report published by civic-tech organisation BudgIT. Another 20 states (55.6%) had portals that existed but contained no procurement data, while the remaining 5 states (13.9%) had neither a portal nor any procurement information publicly available.
Furthermore, the figures indicate that roughly 7 in 10 states have not fully operationalised e-procurement, the report states, describing procurement transparency nationwide as “more aspirational than institutionalised in most states.”
What the score actually measures
BudgIT’s e-procurement indicator carries 11 of the 73 points in its scoring methodology and checks three things, including whether a portal is accessible and navigable, whether the state’s procurement laws and due process rules are published on it, and whether it discloses the beneficial ownership and company names of contracting entities behind awarded projects. States that scored the full 11 points include Adamawa, Anambra, Benue, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Jigawa, Kaduna, Ogun and Ondo, the report’s 9 perfect scorers.
Read Also: Rivers, Oyo Rank Among Lowest Performers in BudgIT’s Q1 2026 Fiscal Transparency Assessment
At the other end, 8 states, Enugu, Delta, Niger, Kano, Taraba, Oyo, and Rivers among them, scored zero on the indicator, per the state-by-state table in the report. BudgIT’s individual state write-ups attribute most of the mid-table losses to a narrower, more specific gap than a missing portal: 11 states scored exactly 5 out of 11, and in each case, according to BudgIT’s write-up for that state, the shortfall was the absence of published 2026 contract awards, meaning the portal exists and is functional but has not yet been updated for the current fiscal year. Abia, Bayelsa, Cross River, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Sokoto, and Zamfara all fall into this category, per the report.
A gap that traces back to the funding that built the portals
The e-procurement indicator did not appear in isolation. It descends from Disbursement-Linked Indicator 6 (DLI 6) of the World Bank’s State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS) Program, a $750 million performance-based financing scheme that ran from 2018 to 2024 and paid states to implement e-procurement in at least four ministries, departments and agencies, including education, health, and public works, and to publish contract awards in Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format, according to World Bank programme documentation and the Open Contracting Partnership, the global body that helped design the standard.
Since that funding wound down, several state portals built under the programme have gone offline or stopped updating, according to a July 2026 investigation by Sahara Reporters, which found Oyo State’s Open Contracting Portal returning a database connection error when checked, among other states’ portals it identified as non-functional. The Open Contracting Partnership’s own account, cited in that reporting, states that many state governments “have either shut down or failed to maintain their OCDS portals” once World Bank funding expired.
However, Kaduna’s procurement authority has continued publishing OCDS-formatted data on its portal for five years running, according to a commitment filed with the Open Government Partnership, though the same filing acknowledges “a need for improvement in terms of adherence to the data standards, integration with other portals, timeliness, completeness, and accuracy” on that portal. Cross River’s Due Process and Price Intelligence Bureau has operated an OCDS-based portal since 2021, per the portal’s own published policy. Lagos State’s procurement agency has run staff training on OCDS compliance for officers across 107 ministries, departments, and agencies, according to the agency’s own website, though Lagos scored only 5 of 11 available points on BudgIT’s e-procurement indicator for Q1 2026, tied to the absence of published 2026 awards specifically rather than an offline portal.
The report’s recommendations for closing the gap are directed at states generally rather than any single government: invest in making e-procurement portals functional and accessible, ensure the underlying data is machine-readable rather than simply present on a webpage, and adhere to OCDS as “best practices and clear standards for public contracting,” the report states.
