SISOCS — Honduras' Infrastructure Open-Data Portal That Took Disclosure from 27% to 95%

Honduran infrastructure procurement suffered chronically poor public disclosure until a 2015 executive decree made publishing data under the CoST Infrastructure Data Standard mandatory for government contracting bodies.

CoST Honduras, working with the World Bank, built SISOCS as a subsystem of the national procurement portal to make infrastructure project data proactively public and open it to citizen verification.

Nine main procuring entities began publishing structured project data on SISOCS, later joined by a companion PPP-tracking portal, with trained citizen volunteers and professional observers cross-checking disclosures against original documents and site visits, following the international OC4IDS standard.

Proactive disclosure rose from 27% in 2014-15 to roughly 95% in later assurance reports, published projects grew from 13 to 2,038 worth over US$1.1 billion, and cost-overrun data coverage rose from 40% (2015) to 95% (2017). The disclosed data drove concrete accountability outcomes, including the dismantling and rebuilding of the Road Fund agency after organised-crime links surfaced in its procurement records, exposure of a US$517 million liability in a tourist-corridor PPP against US$162 million of private investment, and a new mandatory design-update rule after 60% of reviewed road designs were found to rely on outdated plans.

Despite this measured track record, CoST Honduras became an inactive network member in 2023 and formally withdrew in 2024, illustrating that even well-evidenced transparency infrastructure can lose institutional and political backing without durable, legally-mandated funding.