Lesedi Local Municipality launches citizen engagement app
Lesedi Local Municipality (LLM) launched the Citizen Engagement mobile application on July 1.
The mayor, Mluleki Nkosi, together with Vodacom personnel hosted an online session with several local stakeholders to demonstrate the app.
The main purpose of the app is to assist and improve citizen communication with the LLM and support the municipality in its endeavour to improve service delivery.
The app will also provide better coordination by tracking issues logged by citizens, action taken on the issues and will further provide reports on issues logged.
A reference number will be generated by the app as soon as an incident is logged and citizens can track the progress of the issue logged, as well as the timeframe in which it was resolved.
The app also allows for a service delivery rating and comments. All information captured on the app will pull through to the backend and allow for various reports that can be automated or generated on request.
These reports will in turn support among other benefits budget forecasting, service delivery concerns, issues logged per area and timeframe of resolution.
Further benefits of the app are:
• The SmartCitizen mobile app is designed to bring government to citizens’ fingertips and provide an unimagined level of transparency and accountability.
• The app allows users to search for and view details of various useful contacts, such as municipality heads, municipality customer care, emergency services, call centres and other municipality-related useful numbers.
• The app will allow citizens to search for, filter and view details of various municipal facilities close to their location.
• The app will allow citizens to view and download various useful documents and other rich media types such as images, audio and video.
• The app can be used to view Facebook and other social media feeds of the municipality all from one platform.
• The app allows issues of almost any type to be submitted to the department; these could also include compliments and information/service requests.
• Any issues that are discovered by the internal staff can be logged and the relevant business units can be notified. This also includes the issues logged by the general public on the service and/or facilities of the municipality.
• The app will allow the municipality to broadcast public or targeted notifications through it.
• Notifications may consist of a simple message and optional attachments, like images or pdf files.
• Certain directorates can send targeted messages based on area/suburb for users that have captured a valid address in the profile.
The app is available to download from PlayStore on Android devices and will soon be released on IOS. The LLM staff is currently undergoing extensive training on the backend components and operational aspects of the app.
Citizens who do not have a smartphone will be able to use an SMS facility to log an issue and it will also pull through to the backend.
“Making use of technology is the new normal and the app will assist citizens to report municipal issues without having to come to the municipal office,” said Thabiso Moremi from LLM infrastructure services.
