The Procurement Officer is responsible for conducting timely, transparent, competitive, ethical, and well-documented procurement of goods, works, and services for ASLO's Kabul Main Office and field programs. The role protects value for money and program continuity while ensuring compliance with ASLO policies, donor conditions, approved budgets, applicable law, delegated authority, sanctions requirements, and strict conflict-of-interest controls.
1 Procurement Planning and Prioritization
· Consolidate annual, project, and operational procurement plans in coordination with program, finance, logistics, construction, and provincial teams.
· Confirm that purchase requests are complete, technically clear, budgeted, properly authorized, and supported by a realistic required-delivery date before processing.
· Develop procurement timelines, sourcing strategies, packaging approaches, and solicitation methods appropriate to value, risk, complexity, market conditions, and donor rules.
· Track procurement-plan progress, identify delays or bottlenecks, and issue early warnings with practical corrective actions.
· Support emergency procurement using only approved emergency procedures, written justification, appropriate competition where feasible, and complete after-the-fact documentation.
2 Market Research and Sourcing
· Conduct and document market assessments, supplier mapping, price checks, availability analysis, lead-time review, and market-risk analysis.
· Maintain a diverse, current, and properly vetted supplier database without guaranteeing business or creating unfair supplier advantage.
· Use open competition, requests for quotation, invitations to bid, requests for proposal, framework agreements, or other approved methods according to applicable thresholds.
· Ensure specifications are neutral, measurable, nonrestrictive, and do not improperly favor a brand, supplier, origin, or individual.
· Promote fair access for qualified vendors, including women-owned and local businesses where consistent with quality, competition, risk, and donor requirements.
3 Solicitation and Bid Management
· Prepare complete solicitation packages, including instructions, specifications or statements of work, evaluation criteria, delivery terms, required certifications, and contractual conditions.
· Issue solicitations through approved channels, manage bidder questions consistently, and share clarifications or amendments equally with all eligible bidders.
· Protect bid confidentiality, maintain secure receipt and custody of offers, and ensure that quotations or bids are opened by an authorized committee.
· Prepare bid-opening records and administrative compliance checks without changing bids, accepting undisclosed post-deadline corrections, or negotiating outside approved procedures.
· Support evaluation committees with compliant templates, conflict-of-interest declarations, technical and financial comparison tools, and clear documentation of decisions.
4 Evaluation, Due Diligence, and Award
· Conduct vendor eligibility and due-diligence checks, including legal registration, tax status, ownership, bank details, references, capacity, past performance, sanctions screening, and potential conflicts of interest.
· Verify quoted prices, arithmetic, taxes, delivery terms, warranties, and total evaluated cost before an award recommendation is finalized.
· Prepare transparent bid-analysis reports and award recommendations based only on pre-disclosed criteria, documented evidence, and authorized committee decisions.
· Escalate indicators of collusion, bid manipulation, falsified documents, conflicts, related-party transactions, abnormal pricing, or supplier coercion through approved channels.
· Issue regret or award communications only after required approvals and observe standstill, donor no-objection, or notification requirements where applicable.
5 Purchase Orders, Contracts, and Supplier Performance
· Prepare accurate purchase orders, service agreements, framework agreements, and contracts using approved templates and ensure signature by authorized parties before performance begins.
· Maintain a procurement and contract tracker covering value, funding source, delivery milestones, warranties, payments, amendments, expiry dates, and closeout status.
· Coordinate with requestors, logistics, finance, and inspection or receiving committees to confirm timely delivery and objective acceptance of goods, works, and services.
· Document supplier performance, delivery delays, quality failures, warranty issues, contract breaches, liquidated damages, and approved corrective actions.
· Ensure contract amendments, extensions, variations, and price changes are justified, budgeted, reviewed, approved, and documented before implementation.
6 Procurement Records, Reporting, and Audit Readiness
· Maintain a complete procurement file from requisition through competition, evaluation, approval, contracting, receipt, payment support, and closeout.
· Use consistent procurement reference numbers and ensure electronic and physical files are secure, indexed, retrievable, and retained according to policy and donor requirements.
· Prepare weekly pipeline updates, monthly procurement reports, savings and lead-time analysis, vendor-performance reports, and exception reports.
· Respond promptly and accurately to internal audit, external audit, donor review, spot check, monitoring, and compliance requests.
· Ensure procurement records reconcile with finance, inventory, asset, warehouse, contract, and project records.
7 Ethics, Anti-Fraud, and Conflict-of-Interest Compliance
· Maintain strict impartiality and never solicit or accept gifts, commissions, favors, employment promises, confidential advantages, or other benefits from vendors or interested parties.
· Complete periodic and transaction-specific conflict-of-interest declarations and ensure committee members and relevant staff do the same.
· Protect procurement-sensitive information and avoid disclosing budgets, competitor prices, evaluation deliberations, or award recommendations without authorization.
· Rotate responsibilities and apply segregation of duties so no individual controls requisition, solicitation, evaluation, receipt, approval, and payment for the same transaction.
· Immediately report suspected fraud, bribery, collusion, coercion, obstruction, favoritism, sanctions concerns, or document falsification.
8 Coordination and Capacity Strengthening
· Provide practical procurement guidance to Kabul and provincial staff and support orientation on thresholds, lead times, specifications, ethics, documentation, and planning.
· Coordinate with Finance to verify budget availability and tax treatment while preserving independent procurement decision-making.
· Coordinate with Logistics, Engineering, IT, HR, and technical teams on specifications, delivery, inspection, asset registration, warranty, and contract closeout.
· Contribute to procurement-policy updates, template improvement, market-risk controls, framework agreements, and lessons learned.
9. Authority and Internal Controls
· May conduct procurement actions and sign routine process documents only within a formally approved delegation of authority.
· May not approve the underlying purchase request, select a supplier alone, receive goods alone, certify own procurement decisions, or authorize related payments.
· Must stop and escalate any procurement with missing authorization, inadequate competition, suspected conflict, sanctions concern, altered bid, split purchase, unsupported sole source, or other material compliance risk.
· Must ensure that donor prior approval or no-objection requirements are obtained before award whenever applicable.
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Safeguarding, Ethics, and Accountability
· Demonstrate the highest standards of integrity, neutrality, confidentiality, respect, and professional conduct.
· Comply with ASLO's Code of Conduct and policies on safeguarding, child protection, prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA), prevention of sexual harassment, fraud, corruption, bribery, conflicts of interest, whistleblowing, data protection, and accountability to affected populations.
· Immediately disclose any actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest and recuse from related decisions until formally cleared.
· Report suspected misconduct, misuse of resources, control weaknesses, or safeguarding concerns through approved and confidential reporting channels.
· Protect organizational, employee, beneficiary, vendor, and donor information and use it only for authorized purposes.
