And in other news, today the Social Investment Fund held a contractors forum aimed at expanding their pool of contractors. SIF finances multiple projects around the country, but in an effort to be more transparent, they are ensuring that different contractors have an equal opportunity at getting a contract with them. The executive director explained about 30 contractors were at today's event, and they were walked through the application process.
Carlos Tun, Executive Director, SIF
"For some time now, the board of directors, the managers of SIF and the staff has seen the need to increase the pool of contractors. We've seen throughout projects at SIF that it's the same contractors building every time so we want to ensure that we have a space like this today in which we can invite contractors so we can answer some of the questions and some of the concerns that they have so they can start to bid for some of those projects at SIF."
"We started with the north because our main focus is not only to center only in Belize but we need to ensure that all contractors are involved so we started with the north last week at Escuela Secondaria Mexico, we're doing on today and then we plan to do one in the south as well."
Nellie Trench, Finance Unit Coordinator, SIF
"As mentioned before, 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 allow them to become non responsive 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."
"So we're walking them through some of the main areas that we have found problems with, issues that they are having and then we try to do it in a very easy and understandable manner for them to understand."
