SIF Hosts Its First Contractor’s Forum

The Belize Social Investment Fund Contractors’ Forum concluded today in Belize City. The first day of the forum took place in Corozal Town, where contractors met. The event moved to Belize City, where small, medium, and large-scale contractors engaged in discussion surrounding the requirements and processes to bid for contracts. SIF’s Finance Unit Coordinator, Nellie Trench, told us more.

 

Nellie Trench, Finance Unit Coordinator, SIF

“The purpose of the workshop is to walk the contractors through the process in terms of when they’re filling out the bidding documents. What SIF has experienced with contractors is that when they’re filling out these documents, there’s a lot of errors that are made, and these errors allows them to become nonresponsive. And so some of the key areas, the senior procurement officer, the finance and the technical unit coordinator is walking them through are the forms and the errors that they have made. And another highlight of the workshop is to provide to them so we’re going to send in some of the projects that are in the pipeline for safe in terms of small, medium and large scale project, and then that will give them an opportunity to send in a bid for those.”

 

Carlos Tun, Executive Director, SIF

“For some time now, the Board of Directors, the managers at SIF, and the staff have seen the need to increase the pool of contractors. We have seen throughout the projects at SIF that it’s the same contractors bidding every time. So we want to ensure that we have a space like the one today. In which we can invite contractors so that we can answer some of the questions, some of the concerns they have so that they can start to bid for those projects at SIF. We want to assure contractors that the process is transparent. There are three layers of transparency at SIF. One would be our internal supervision to our engineers. We also have the supervision by the consultant and the third supervision will be from the financial institution such CDP or any other institution that is working with us.”