KEYUREN Maharaj, the chairperson of the Glenwood Ratepayers and Residents’ Association and the student who developed CityMenderSA, shared his excitement about the app aimed at improving service delivery issues.

“With our one month pilot test coming to an end this past weekend we are excited to launch our CityMenderSA app which has been in testing and will be available from this week Thursday on the Play Store. The app will have exclusive features like ‘My Reports’, where one can keep track of their service delivery issues that they reported,” said Maharaj.

“During our pilot month, residents have logged 600 issues through our website, and we have captured over 600 000 data points. For the first time in South Africa, residents now have the power to visualise service delivery issues in real time, in their communities and also throughout the entire South Africa. So with CityMenderSA, we’re not just collecting complaints, but we are building a publicly accessible database of infrastructure issues that shows us where the systems are failing.”

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Maharaj continued, “Every report creates multiple data points, every update tells a story, and every interactive map lets residents, councillors, community organisations and municipalities see the full picture and not just isolated problems.
“I designed it to be easy to use and to help residents, but also municipalities, to identify and understand how they can improve service delivery. My team, together with eThekwini Ratepayers and Residents Association, will be setting up meetings with municipalities to show them how this can be achieved. This application can tie into any municipality system for free and will be universal over the entire country, meaning that any South African from any background can access and use it.”

Maharaj added that with more functionality and future updates, CityMenderSA will change the way residents go about service delivery and infrastructure improvements.

Also read: Slow service delivery irks Manor Gardens UIP

“We’ve listened to feedback from South Africans over the last month and have added the ability to upload photos with their reports; we’ve added more update choices for reports; residents can now use their current location to log a report; once a report is logged residents can share it via WhatsApp or email to the ratepayer association, councillor or municipality; and now you can search for any report using its reference number and download its history as a pdf.”

An IOS app is in progress and will be available soon.

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