How it works
The Scoutender methodology
Hundreds of donor, agency and government portals publish tenders and expressions of interest every day. Scoutender captures that flow, filters out the noise, and surfaces the opportunities genuinely relevant to your firm — each with a score tailored to your strategy. Here is how, step by step.
The problem we solve
Finding the right tenders in Africa is a full-time job: the information is scattered across dozens of international donors, UN agencies, climate funds and national portals, each with its own format, language and publishing rhythm. Generic monitoring tools cast too wide a net for a specialized firm and are rarely built for Francophone Africa. Scoutender was designed to close that gap: monitoring calibrated for Africa, bilingual (and Lusophone), and above all tailored to your sectors, your countries and your types of contracts.
Capture without missing anything
We continuously monitor more than 100 technical sources tied to 40 donors and institutions: multilateral and regional banks (World Bank, African Development Bank, BADEA…), bilateral cooperation agencies (KfW, AFD, LuxDev…), the UN system, climate funds and national public-procurement portals. When a source offers an official, structured data feed, we use it first — it is the most reliable. Elsewhere, more than 50 extraction techniques take over to read standard websites, interactive portals and even PDF documents. The whole set is scanned every 30 minutes, and new sources are added at client firms' request. Each source is tracked by a health indicator that alerts us the moment it stops responding.
Artificial intelligence does the sorting
Every captured notice goes through several layers of analysis. A business-rules engine, refined in both French and English, identifies the vocabulary specific to public contracts, the sector among 14 families (energy, transport, water and sanitation, health, education, telecoms, mining, climate, construction, finance…), the country targeted and the type of opportunity (tender, expression of interest, pre-qualification). Ambiguous cases the rules cannot settle are handed to an artificial-intelligence model. The result: noise — award notices, menu pages, off-topic listings — is discarded automatically, and every retained opportunity arrives correctly labelled, with no manual sorting.
A score personalized to your firm
This is the heart of Scoutender: no two firms see the same ranking. Rather than a generic relevance, each opportunity gets a score from 0 to 100 computed according to your strategy. You — and our team during onboarding — set the weight of every criterion: priority countries, sectors and sub-sectors, contract types, preferred donors, keywords that matter (or that disqualify). Tuning happens at two levels: a baseline shared across your firm, which each member can refine for their own watch. The score is fully explainable: one click reveals the detailed calculation, criterion by criterion. You can rank hundreds of notices by real relevance and spot at a glance the few percent that deserve your attention.
Every opportunity enriched
Spotting an opportunity is not enough — you still need to decide quickly whether it is worth a bid. For each retained notice, Scoutender fetches the detail page and the associated documents (including PDF terms of reference) and automatically extracts the essentials: project description, components, required qualifications, expert profiles sought, financing mode, budget when available, and above all the deadlines. You get a concise summary and a direct link to the official documents — enough to make a go / no-go decision in seconds rather than by opening ten tabs.
Geographic coverage
Since June 2026, coverage is continental: all 54 African Union member states are monitored — Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone. To make setup easier, countries are grouped by economic union (ECOWAS, COMESA, SADC, North Africa…) and by broad zones (Central Africa, Horn of Africa, Indian Ocean). Conversely, a long list of out-of-zone countries and regions is excluded automatically: an opportunity published on a global portal but concerning a region of Asia or Latin America is set aside by default, without cluttering your watch.
The tool keeps improving
A watch is only useful if it stays reliable over time. Two mechanisms ensure that. First, the health of every source is continuously tracked — success rate, volumes captured, rejection reasons: any failure is detected and fixed. Second, your feedback feeds the tool directly: flagging a misclassified opportunity corrects the artificial intelligence, and that correction is permanent, never overwritten by a later automated process. Over time, the sorting becomes more and more accurate, calibrated to the reality of your business.
What happens next: your team pipeline
The methodology ends where your team's work begins. Once captured, sorted, scored and enriched, your opportunities flow into a pipeline private to your firm: you qualify them together — from "Interesting" to "Won" — comment, assign and track their deadlines, as a list, a kanban board or a calendar, with a dashboard that sums up your activity.