About Idb
Idb provides live Inter-American Development Bank procurement notices, contract awards, and cross-debarment checks using the bank’s open-data portal. It supports procurement research and vendor screening without an API key.
Key features
- 01Search live procurement notices
- 02Retrieve full notice records
- 03Search awarded contracts
- 04Check debarment across five banks
Use cases
- 01Find open IDB bidding opportunities by country
- 02Review contract awards by firm or sector
- 03Screen a vendor against cross-debarment lists
MCP support
Exposes procurement notice, award, and debarment tools to MCP clients through the Pipeworx gateway or a standalone stdio server. It queries IDB's keyless CKAN open-data portal.
Configuration
Remote servers need no local install. Pick your client, then copy the config or install in one click.
https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcpclaude mcp add --transport http pipeworx-io-idb https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp{"mcpServers":{"pipeworx-io-idb":{"type":"http","url":"https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp"}}}Open in Cursor{"servers":{"pipeworx-io-idb":{"type":"http","url":"https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp"}}}Open in VS Code{"mcpServers":{"pipeworx-io-idb":{"type":"http","url":"https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp"}}}{"mcpServers":{"pipeworx-io-idb":{"serverUrl":"https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp"}}}Run commands in a terminal; paste JSON into the client’s MCP config and restart. Servers that need sign-in will prompt on first connect.
Tools
Details
From the project README@pipeworx/idb
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) project procurement — live bidding notices, contract awards, and a 5-multilateral-development-bank cross-debarment check, all sourced from IDB's keyless CKAN open-data portal.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1881+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.
Tools
idb_search_notices(...)— search live IDB procurement notices (bids, expressions of interest, general/specific notices, award notifications) across 26 LAC countries; defaults to open (deadline not passed) notices.idb_get_notice(notice_id)— full record for one notice.idb_search_awards(...)— search ~159k awarded IDB project contracts by country, firm, sector, or year.idb_check_mdb_debarment(name, ...)— check a name against IDB's own debarment list plus the cross-debarment lists of the World Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, and EBRD (one shared feed answering "is this vendor debarred" across five banks).
Auth
Keyless.
Data sources
- https://data.iadb.org/dataset/project-procurement-bidding-notices-and-notification-of-contract-awards — bidding notices + award notifications (~37,000 rows).
- https://data.iadb.org/dataset/idb-project-procurement-contract-awards-data — award-level contract detail (~159,000 rows; the dataset page offers a ~70MB CSV, but the same data is exposed via CKAN's Datastore, so every tool here queries it live with server-side SQL rather than downloading the file).
- https://data.iadb.org/dataset/dataset-of-sanctioned-firms-and-individuals — IDB debarment + WBG/ADB/AfDB/EBRD cross-debarment (~1,300 rows).
All three are queried through data.iadb.org/api/3/action/datastore_search_sql
(CKAN Datastore, keyless, no auth). Notes for anyone touching this pack:
- Every resource here is CKAN Datastore-active —
package_showon each dataset reportsdatastore_active: true, which is what makes live SQL querying possible instead of downloading and caching the 70MB awards file ourselves. Checkdatastore_activebefore assuming a new IDB dataset needs downloading. - The plain
/files/download/<id>URLs sit behind an AWS WAF bot challenge (HTTP 202,x-amzn-waf-action: challenge, on a bare request) — irrelevant here since nothing calls them, but don't reach for them if extending this pack; the Datastore API is unaffected. - The upstream's own full-text search (
q=ondatastore_search) is accent-SENSITIVE.q=Gonzalez(unaccented) returns zero rows against a debarment table full of "González" (with the accent) — verified live.idb_check_mdb_debarmentnever usesq=; it fetches the whole (small, ~1,300-row) debarment table and matches client-side with NFD-normalized, diacritic-stripped, token-substring comparison. typein the notices table has inconsistent trailing whitespace —SELECT DISTINCT "type"returns"AWARD","AWARD ", and"AWARD "as three separate values. AlwaysTRIM()before comparing, and match with a prefixILIKE, never=.datastore_search_sqlhas no bind-parameter support — every string argument is quote-escaped ('→'') before interpolation. CKAN's SQL endpoint itself only acceptsSELECTstatements against a read replica.- Many
idb-project-procurement-contract-awards-datarows recordawarded_firm_nameas"Not Available"— this is by design for individual-consultant selections (contract_type: "Individual Consultants"), not a data gap.
Quick Start
Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
{
"mcpServers": {
"idb": {
"url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp"
}
}
}
What this endpoint actually serves
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/idb/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
{
"mcpServers": {
"pipeworx": {
"url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
}
}
}
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1881+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
No MCP client? Call it over HTTP
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/idb_search_notices \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"country":"Peru","open_only":true,"limit":5}'
No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/idb_search_notices. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.
Standalone (no gateway account)
This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:
{
"mcpServers": {
"idb": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-idb"]
}
}
}
Or run it directly to confirm it starts:
npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-idb
It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call
for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.
Using with ask_pipeworx
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Idb data" })
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
More
License
MIT
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