From 5-7 March 2025, South Korea’s Public Procurement Service hosted an extraordinary conference featuring centralized purchasing agencies from over half of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states, from North America, Europe and Asia. The conference presentations, available for download here, addressed next steps for central purchasing bodies, including in sustainability, procurement-for-innovation and artificial intelligence (AI). The program was kindly coordinated by Paulo Magina and Erika Bozzay of the OECD, and was led by Korean Public Procurement Service (PPS) Administrator Lim Ki-keun (left center front in photo below).
Professor Daein Kim of Ewha Women’s University’s School of Law (Seoul) is visiting Washington with a team of fellow researchers from South Korea to share lessons learned on humanitarian assistance in fragile states. Professor Kim previously visited George Washington University Law School as a Visiting Scholar, and he is a long-time friend of GW Law’s Government Procurement Law Program.
The team’s visit is part of a broader initiative in South Korea to expand foreign aid. As an October 2024 article in the Korea Timesexplained:
The [South Korean] government is expanding financial support to developing countries, with its goal of becoming one of the world’s top 10 donors of official development assistance (ODA) before the end of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s term.
A main source of financing for international development assistance, ODA is government aid designed to promote the economic well-being and welfare of developing countries.
The areas of the country’s support range from the fight against climate change to the energy transition, agricultural transformation, education, digital technology and knowledge sharing.
Such support is being made in partnership with international organizations, such as the United Nations (U.N.) as well as Korea’s decade-long foreign assistance programs such as the Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF).
Professor Kim and his team will be meeting with leaders in the procurement and aid communities in the United States to discuss how contracts, grants and cooperative agreements can be used to make foreign assistance more efficient and effective.
