STEM Radar

Who trains teachers to use the equipment it sells them

Companies listed both in the MES register for teacher qualification training AND among the suppliers in STEM public procurement.

Conflict of interest

When the same company sells the STEM equipment to the school and sells the training on how to use it, it is on both sides of the deal.

Matches that are NOT included in the table

We show them deliberately, so it is clear what was filtered out and why, instead of having it disappear silently.

Sources: IROPK (MES) · Ordinance No. 15/2019 · CAIS EPP (storage.eop.bg) · lookup …

What is actually being purchased in STEM centers

Item by item, across all contracts for which the document is readable. Search freely, "printer," "microscope," "display."

Technical specifications from CAIS EPP

This view is not refreshed every night.

A known limitation we are not hiding: in part of the contracts read, only one row of the table. This is almost certainly an undercounted table, not a contract for a single item, meaning the quantities here are underestimated, not inflated.

That is why here none „implied unit price" (contract value ÷ quantity). We checked it empirically: for contracts with a single extracted line item, it produces things like „wires, 1 pc., BGN 225,830" and „3D printer, 1 pc., BGN 164,700". These aren't prices, they are entire contracts divided by one unread number. Publishing them would be the same mistake as the removed „markup barometer".

Legal basis, two provisions from the Regulations for the Implementation of the Public Procurement Act (ЗОП/PPA).

Art. 19a(2)(5): „public procurement contracts and framework agreements, including their annexes, on the day the contract award notice was published". The contractor's price offer is an annex to the contract.

Art. 39(5) (new, State Gazette issue 35 of 2021): "The participants cannot invoke confidentiality with respect to the price proposal, including the unit prices that make it up."

That means the breakdown by unit price cannot be redacted as a trade secret. Source, verified verbatim: ППЗОП (Regulations for the Implementation of the Public Procurement Act), official edition of the Public Procurement Agency (PDF).



So why is there no comparison with other countries? The logical question is whether Bulgarian prices can be checked against European ones. We checked TED, the EU-wide public procurement register, and the answer is no, for three separate reasons, each of them measured:

1. TED has no unit price field at all. Request for unit-price returns UNSUPPORTED_VALUE, no such field exists in the API.
2. There is a quantity field, but it is empty. In a sample of 500 notices under five codes related to STEM equipment (displays, laptop computers, printers and plotters, educational equipment, laboratory equipment), a quantity was entered for 5, 1.0%. Where a quantity is filled in at European scale, it is usually electricity in kWh, not units of equipment. So the workaround „value ÷ quantity" is closed off, too.
3. The values are in different currencies. A single sample contains PLN, EUR, RON, CZK and NOK all at once, and TED does not convert them. A comparison without conversion is a comparison of incomparable numbers.

That is why the unit prices here come from the documents of the Bulgarian contracts, not from a European registry. The check is from 30 July 2026 via the public API api.ted.europa.eu/v3; if TED adds such fields, this will need to be checked again.

We also searched by national documents. Poland publishes the same type of procurement with technical specification for STEM labs (19 pages), which is surprisingly close to the Bulgarian one, 3D printer, 3D pens, microcontroller kit, laser plotter with fume extraction, soldering stations, interactive display min. 75″, electronic microscopes, with explicit minimum quantities. But there are no unit prices there either: the only figure stated is a total budget of 100 888 889 € for the entire procurement. The Romanian guide on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) for classroom equipment does not contain an equipment list at all, it is administrative, covering the application procedure.
In other words, the absence of published unit prices is not a Bulgarian problem. The difference is that here they exist in the contract annexes, and that is precisely why they are extracted from there.

What this does NOT prove. The data shows what is missing from the published package, it does not establish a violation by a specific contracting authority. It is possible that for some of the contracts, the prices are recorded in the body of the contract itself, rather than in a separate annex; it is also possible that the document was published on the buyer's profile but was not captured in the platform's export. The check above measures the first risk, but on a sample, not on all of them.

What changes after signing

Contract amendments are where the price moves after the contract has already been won. Until now, this layer was not tracked at all.

Open data from CAIS EPP