CHALLENGES AND CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR E-PROCUREMENT ADOPTION IN ETHIOPIA

To ensure public procurement process fair, transparent, efficient and ethical, the Ethiopian Government implemented e-procurement adoption in selected pilot public organizations.This study intended to identify the major perceived challenges and critical success factors for eprocurement implementation and to ascertain strategies to mitigating the existing perceived challenges for e-procurement implementation in nine federal level organizations IN Ethiopia, selected as pilot scaled-down e-procurement implementation sites.Interview and structured questionnaire were used to collect primary data from purposively selected top managements and experts with directorate position from Finance, Procurement and ICT department from a total of 27and 54 employees, respectively and carried out analysis with 89 percent response rate.The result revealed that, man-power retention, inconsistent and disruptive infrastructure, integration with the legacy system, top management and employees' commitment and attitude, supplier integration, security fear, weak and inconsistent support, poor monitoring and evaluation practices were found as the major challenges.While, training given to employees on how to use e-procurement tools and best procurement practices, the existence of change management programs for users on implementation of e-procurement through effective consultations and the high skill of procurement employees with IT perspective were found to be the major critical success factor.