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Introducing the Tenders-SA Developer API v2.1.0 — Live South African Procurement Data, AI Enrichment & Compliance Tools

#api #southafrica #procurement #tenders

The Tenders-SA Developer API gives developers structured, real-time access to South African public sector tenders, contract awards, supplier intelligence, forensic risk checks, and CIPC data — all from a single REST API.

South African government procurement is fragmented across dozens of portals — National Treasury eTenders, Eskom, Transnet, SANRAL, nine provincial systems, and hundreds of municipal platforms. Each publishes data in different formats, on different schedules, with inconsistent structure.

The Tenders-SA Developer API v2.1.0 solves this. It aggregates, normalises, and enriches all of that data into a single, consistent REST API that developers can integrate in minutes.

This post covers what's available, how the data pipeline works, and how to make your first API call.

What the API covers

The API is versioned at https://api.tenders-sa.org and organises data across these core domains:

Domain What you get
Tenders Live notices, search, filters, amendments, OCDS identifiers
Awards & Contracts Awarded supplier, value, contract dates, status
Organisations Government departments and issuing entities
Suppliers Contractor profiles and contract history
Directors & CIPC Company registrations, director lookups, enriched profiles
Forensic National Treasury restricted supplier checks with fuzzy matching
Documents Tender document metadata and secure download URLs
Intelligence Market alerts, sector insights, curated intel items
Provinces & Categories Reference data, health scores, industry benchmarks
OCDS Open Contracting Data Standard party data

Authentication

Every endpoint requires a Bearer token:

GET /v2/tenders
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TSA_API_KEY
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Get your key at tenders-sa.org/developers.

Making your first request

Fetch active tenders filtered by province and category:

curl -G https://api.tenders-sa.org/v2/tenders \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TSA_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "province=gauteng" \
  --data-urlencode "status=active" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=10"
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A typical tender response includes:

{
  "id": "tnd_01j...",
  "title": "Supply and Delivery of ICT Equipment",
  "source_organization": "Department of Basic Education",
  "province": "Gauteng",
  "closing_date": "2025-08-15T12:00:00Z",
  "estimated_value": 4500000,
  "bbbee_requirements": "Level 1-2 preferred",
  "ai_summary": "Procurement of laptops, tablets, and networking equipment for school connectivity programme.",
  "ai_key_requirements": "CIPC registration, valid tax clearance, minimum 3 years supply experience",
  "ai_confidence": 0.94,
  "status": "active"
}
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Notice the ai_* fields — these are not raw scraped data. Every tender passes through an enrichment pipeline before it reaches the API.

The enrichment pipeline

Raw government procurement data is rarely usable as-is. Before any record is available through the API, it goes through the following stages:

1. Ingestion — OCDS feeds are pulled from all major government sources on a continuous sync schedule.

2. Normalisation — Fields are standardised across sources: dates into ISO 8601, values into ZAR floats, provinces into canonical slugs, categories into a consistent taxonomy.

3. AI Enrichment — Each tender is processed by an AI pipeline that extracts:

  • ai_summary — plain-language description of what's being procured
  • ai_key_requirements — eligibility and submission requirements
  • ai_title_enriched — corrected/expanded title where the original is vague
  • ai_confidence — model confidence score (0–1)
  • analysis_quality_score — overall data quality rating

4. Document Analysis — Where tender documents are available, they're fetched, extracted, and analysed. The document_analyzed flag and ai_key_points field indicate when document-level intelligence is present.

5. Deduplication — Cross-source duplicates are detected and flagged via is_duplicate and duplicate_of fields, so your application doesn't surface the same opportunity twice.

Forensic & compliance checks

One of the most requested capabilities for procurement platforms is supplier risk screening. The API exposes the National Treasury restricted suppliers register with two endpoints:

Fuzzy match — returns ranked candidates:

curl "https://api.tenders-sa.org/v2/forensic/restricted-suppliers/match?q=Acme+Construction" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TSA_API_KEY"
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Point-in-time check — returns a boolean clearance result:

curl "https://api.tenders-sa.org/v2/forensic/restricted-suppliers/check?q=Acme+Construction" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TSA_API_KEY"
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Combined with CIPC director lookups (/v2/cipc/directors), this enables full entity due diligence without leaving the API.

CIPC & director intelligence

The /v2/cipc/enrichments and /v2/cipc/directors endpoints surface Companies and Intellectual Property Commission data linked to suppliers in the procurement dataset. This is useful for:

  • Verifying company registration status before bid submission
  • Identifying director overlaps across multiple supplier entities
  • Enriching CRM or compliance records with structured CIPC data

Province health scores

Each province has a health score endpoint that surfaces aggregated procurement health metrics:

GET /v2/provinces/{id}/health-scores
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This is useful for building regional procurement dashboards or benchmarking spend patterns across provinces.

OCDS compliance

All tender records carry an ocid field conforming to the Open Contracting Data Standard. The /v2/ocds/parties endpoint exposes structured party data for interoperability with other OCDS-compliant systems — useful if you're building on top of global procurement transparency tooling.

JavaScript quick-start 

const BASE = 'https://api.tenders-sa.org/v2';
const KEY = process.env.TSA_API_KEY;

async function fetchTenders(province = 'gauteng', limit = 20) {
  const params = new URLSearchParams({ province, status: 'active', limit });
  const res = await fetch(`${BASE}/tenders?${params}`, {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${KEY}` }
  });
  if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`API error ${res.status}`);
  return res.json();
}

async function checkSupplier(name) {
  const params = new URLSearchParams({ q: name });
  const res = await fetch(`${BASE}/forensic/restricted-suppliers/check?${params}`, {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${KEY}` }
  });
  return res.json();
}
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Python quick-start 

import os, httpx

BASE = "https://api.tenders-sa.org/v2"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['TSA_API_KEY']}"}

def fetch_tenders(province="gauteng", limit=20):
    r = httpx.get(f"{BASE}/tenders", headers=HEADERS,
                  params={"province": province, "status": "active", "limit": limit})
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()

def check_supplier(name: str):
    r = httpx.get(f"{BASE}/forensic/restricted-suppliers/check",
                  headers=HEADERS, params={"q": name})
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()
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Resources

What's next

The v2.1.0 release stabilises the core data model and enrichment pipeline. Upcoming work includes webhook support for real-time tender alerts, expanded SDK coverage, and additional AI matching endpoints for supplier-to-opportunity recommendations.

If you're building on the API or have questions, open an issue on GitHub or reach out via the developer portal.

Built for developers who want to work with South African procurement data — without the scraping, cleaning, and normalisation overhead.

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