Publication policy

The National Council for Construction (NCC) is the publisher of the official public infrastructure data on this portal. CoST Zambia supports the publication through methodology, stakeholder engagement, and transparency guidance. The Zambia Public Procurement Authority (ZPPA) remains the source authority for e-GP procurement records.

Access to Information Act 2023, sections 3(d), 8, 9, and 18(2). Section 3(d) establishes the proactive-publication principle. Section 8 lists categories of information that must be published, including contract details. Section 9 requires every information holder to designate an information officer. Section 18(2) requires records to be maintained in a reproducible form.

NCC Act 2020, sections 53 and 56. Section 53 authorises NCC to monitor projects above a prescribed value and to share information with other appropriate authorities. Section 56 authorises NCC to develop and operate systems for the publication and management of construction-industry information; this portal is the operational expression of that power.

Public infrastructure projects above the value prescribed by NCC under s.53(1). Source systems are the ZPPA e-GP procurement system, NCC Inspection Forms (where digitised), the NCC Contractor Register, and the NCC Project Register. Identification, preparation, and procurement data are sourced from ZPPA e-GP and published by NCC today. Implementation, completion, maintenance, and decommissioning data, where held by NCC, will be integrated through the NCC data-sharing pathway described under the legal basis above.

Open Contracting for Infrastructure Data Standard (OC4IDS) v0.9.5. The portal targets the 35 OC4IDS fields the ZPPA e-GP system can publish today, expanding to 55 fields within twelve months after format-fix work, as set out in the Zambia Field-Level Mapping Report.

Where OC4IDS already provides a field, the portal uses the standard field: internal project references are published inidentifiers, photo evidence is published as documents withdocumentType: illustration, and contract provenance is published ascontractingProcesses[].summary.sources. Zambia-specific fields that do not have a clean OC4IDS path are kept separate from standard OC4IDS fields under thezambiaPortalExtensions object in the published JSON:

• contractingProcesses[].summary.zambiaPortalExtensions.forceAccount — a flag indicating implementation by direct government labour rather than an external supplier.
• zambiaPortalExtensions.maintenanceRecords and zambiaPortalExtensions.decommissioning publish post-handover lifecycle information that OC4IDS 0.9.5 does not model directly.

NCC contractor grade is stored in the source schema but is not yet emitted in the public OC4IDS JSON. Extension registration with the Open Contracting Partnership is pending.

Bi-annual minimum as required by ATI Act s.8(3). Target cadence: monthly, in line with the ZPPA e-GP publication rhythm. The Last updated label on the dashboard reflects the most recent record write in the underlying database.

Per ATI Act s.9, the designated information officer for NCC is listed below. Contact the officer for access-to-information requests, corrections, or complaints about data published on this portal.

Officer details to be confirmed by NCC. In the interim, contact zambia@infrastructuretransparency.org.

Information may be withheld or redacted on the grounds set out in Part IV of the Access to Information Act 2023 (cabinet records, defence and international relations, commercial information of a third party, personal information, and law-enforcement records). Where data are redacted, an entry is recorded in the published redaction log (forthcoming). The public-interest override at s.22 may compel disclosure notwithstanding an exemption.

The three projects shown in the “Worth your attention” section of the landing page are chosen automatically by a published rule, not by editorial judgement. Each of the three slots scores every published project on a single dimension and picks the highest scorer, subject to diversity constraints:

• Watch — projects with active risk indicators. Risk indicators are R1 one-tenderer award, R2 supplier concentration, R3 budget-to-award variance, and R4 missed milestone. Score: 0.4 × (red indicators / max red indicators) + 0.3 × (amber indicators / max amber indicators) + 0.3 × (value at stake / max value at stake). Value at stake is the project budget or, where no budget is disclosed, the disclosed contract value.
• Material update — projects with a recent substantive change. Score: 0.5 × recency_weight + 0.3 × magnitude + 0.2 × publish_freshness, where magnitude counts the meaningful child rows present (contract, payment certificate, progress, final cost, document).
• Disclosure gap — projects with a high budget that have not yet disclosed key OC4IDS information. Score:0.4 × coverage gap + 0.3 × value at stake + 0.3 × age weight, where coverage gap measures the share of tenderer, contract, progress, and document fields that is still empty.

A 14-day freshness rule then demotes any project that has already appeared in that slot recently — its score is multiplied by exp(-days_since_feature / 14), capped at 0.7 even on the first day. Diversity constraints follow: no project appears in two slots, no public authority holds more than one slot, and no sector holds more than two. The result is a line-up that rotates as agencies disclose more.

Spotlight history is recorded only by explicit administrative or scheduled publication actions, not by public page visits. The internal spotlight_history table records project id, slot, score, and timestamp for audit review.