National Competitive Tendering is Ghana's default, and most-used, public procurement method. New analysis of 26 project risk factors shows exactly where…
National Competitive Tendering (NCT) is the default procurement method under Ghana's Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), and by a wide margin the most used route for public works contracts, outranking every other method regardless of whether a project is small, medium, or large. That popularity makes an obvious question worth asking: what kind of risk comes bundled with the method public entities reach for by default?
A 2015 study by Bernard Baiden, Suleman Abdul-Razak Batong, and James Danku, published in the International Journal of Procurement Management , set out to answer exactly that. Drawing on survey responses from 98 procurement officers, engineers, and quantity surveyors across 224 Ghanaian procuring entities, the researchers evaluated 26 project risk factors on two separate dimensions, how often each one occurs, and how severely it affects project outcomes when it does. The distinction matters: a risk that happens constantly but barely moves the needle is a very different management problem from one that's rare but devastating.
The two risk categories that matter most
Two categories stood out as both frequent and damaging, the combination that should worry any organisation bidding on or managing NCT-procured works.
Financial risks were the single biggest driver of risk on NCT contracts. Delays in releasing retention, delays in agreeing variations, delayed payments from clients, delayed interim certificates, and delayed settlement of claims all ranked among the most frequent and most impactful risk factors identified. The pattern points to a structural issue rather than a one-off inefficiency: public entities appear to face real uncertainty around the timely release of budgeted funds, even on projects they have already planned and costed.
Design risks followed closely behind. Changes to the initial design, variations to works, production target slippage, and underestimating project complexity all scored high on both occurrence and impact. The researchers link this to a structural feature of NCT itself: it typically separates design from construction, engaging a design consultant ahead of the build phase. That separation creates room for communication gaps between the design and construction teams, gaps that show up later as costly mid-project changes.
Together, financial and design risk factors accounted for ten of the risk variables landing in the "high occurrence–high impact" quadrant of the study's risk matrix, the zone that most directly threatens cost and schedule.
The risks that are rare but severe
A second, less intuitive finding: several economic and environmental risk factors, changes in currency exchange rates, access to funds at reasonable interest rates, client insolvency, and labour strikes among them, occurred relatively infrequently but carried high impact when they did.
The likely explanation is exposure time. NCT procurement in Ghana carries a minimum lead time of roughly 4.5 months between tender award and site commencement, during which economic conditions can shift in ways entirely outside a contractor's or client's control. Low frequency does not mean low stakes here, it means these risks sit better in a contingency plan than in a daily risk log.
By contrast, factors like inclement weather, estimating error, labour shortage, and archaeological finds were both infrequent and low-impact, a useful reminder that not every textbook construction risk carries equal weight in every market. Notably, the study found no risk factors that were frequent but low-impact, suggesting that on NCT-procured projects in Ghana, anything that happens often also tends to matter.
Why this matters beyond the numbers
For contractors and public entities alike, the practical implication is not simply "watch out for financial and design risk", most practitioners already sense that intuitively. It is that the data quantifies why those categories deserve disproportionate attention in risk management planning, and points to where the underlying causes sit:
Financial risk mitigation likely has more to do with how public entities plan and release funds against their procurement pipeline than with contractor performance, a governance and budgeting issue as much as a project one.
Design risk mitigation points toward the value of design audits and stronger design-construction coordination before implementation begins, rather than only during it.
Economic and environmental risk , while less frequent, still warrants contractual and financial contingency, not dismissal, given how long an NCT procurement cycle can run before it's even converted into physical work on site.
There is also a broader signal in the study's earlier finding that NCT was ranked the preferred method even for contracts explicitly categorised as low-risk or low-value, where a lighter-touch method would ordinarily apply. That pattern suggests procurement method selection in practice does not always track the risk profile it is meant to manage, a gap that compounds, rather than offsets, the risk factors identified above.
The takeaway
Procurement method choice is not a purely administrative decision, it is a risk allocation decision, whether or not it is treated as one. For organisations operating in or advising on Ghana's public works sector, the evidence points to a clear priority order: build financial-risk resilience into contract and cash-flow planning, invest in design coordination before breaking ground, and keep contingency, not complacency, as the default posture toward the economic risks that show up rarely but hit hard.
Keynote:
Baiden, B. K., Batong, R. S., & Danku J. C. (2015). The impact of project risk factors on national competitive tendering procurement method in Ghana. International Journal of Project Organisation and Management , 7 (6), 731–752.