Battling corruption in Paraguay

Public money spent in secret is public money wasted. That is the premise behind ReAcción, a Paraguayan civic organization that combines education, strategic communication, and social technology to push for government transparency — particularly in public contracting.

Until recently, Paraguay’s public contracts were scanned documents with no machine-readable metadata. The information existed on paper; it was simply inaccessible. We analyzed hundreds of contracts manually to demonstrate that civil society had real demand for transparency, and that demand helped catalyze the first steps toward digitalization. Once the data became available in structured form, I built a Google Scripts project that extracted the metadata of all public contracts from 2012 to 2019. That dataset became the foundation for several investigative articles on contracting patterns and anomalies.

The technical scaffolding follows the Open Contracting Data Standards — an international framework that makes government spending comparable, auditable, and searchable across countries. Paraguay still has a long way to go, but the data is now public.