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Outa have offering a free service delivery reporting app to municipalities for three years, but only one metro accepted.
Image for illustrative purposes. Picture: iStock
The largest municipalities across South Africa are on the hunt for new ideas to solve service delivery challenges.
An Intercity Innovation Challenge was launched last week with two core themes in mind — township tech transformation and intelligent service delivery.
Spearheaded by the South African Local Government Association (Salga), assistance with the project will be provided by business incubator specialists and tertiary institutions.
Tech solutions for municipalities
The search for ideas will focus on the Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, Cape Town, Buffalo City, Mangaung, eThekwini and Nelson Mandela Bay municipalities.
The initiative plans to pair enhanced service delivery and digital technologies with the values and goals of the G20, National Development Plan 2030 and Integrated Urban Development Framework.
“This national initiative aims to chiefly surface community-powered, tech-enabled solutions that promote inclusive development and foster innovation, improve public service delivery and management decision-making,” stated Salga.
The Innovation Hub, Innovate Durban and Wits University’s Tshimologong Precinct will be judging the ideas based on challenge-specific criteria.
The innovation challenge is a spin-off of a similar project that has been running in Johannesburg for several years.
Last October, the City of Johannesburg offered R1 million for the best way to fix the city, but no winners have been made public to date.
Two specific challenges
The township tech transformation challenge will be a call for solutions to infrastructure, unemployment and limited digital access in informal settlements.
Submissions must be innovative, original, feasible, scalable and demonstrate the potential for social impact through clear presentation.
Submissions for the intelligent service delivery challenge must meet the same criteria but must address “reactive, inefficient, or disconnected” service delivery.
“Intelligent service delivery means using real-time data, predictive maintenance, user feedback, and automation to provide services more efficiently, transparently, and sustainably,” stated Salga.
Winning ideas will receive funding and early-stage developmental support, which will include technical and business mentorship.
Existing Outa solution
Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) CEO Wayne Duvenage considered the Salga initiative a “good idea”, as he believes the body was mandated to assist local government interests.
“As it is, many municipalities outsource their services to external consultants, due to their incompetence on matters such as finance, engineering, road maintenance, etc,” Duvenage told The Citizen.
However, Duvenage explained that Outa had been offering a free service delivery reporting app to Salga and the same metros for the past three years.
“This was a live, geolocation incident reporting tool which enables residents to report potholes, traffic light malfunctions, water leaks, sewage leaks, signage issues, street lights, etc,” he said.
He added that this data would be fed directly into the municipality’s enterprise resource planning systems, but that only 10 small municipalities and the City of Cape Town had taken up the free offer.
“They just didn’t want to take it up. I think it may also have something to do with civil society owning the process instead of themselves,” suggested Duvenage.
“The app would have allowed us as civil society to benchmark cities with the best levels of repair times, and we believe the poorly managed cities did not want that, so they simply didn’t respond,” he added.
Intellectual property retained
The window for idea submissions will be open between 13 June and 15 August, with an announcement on winning ideas scheduled for November.
Participants retain ownership of their intellectual property, including current government employees whose employment contracts take precedence over the project terms and conditions.
“[We aim] to unlock the under-leveraged innovation ecosystem by supporting low-cost, high-impact solutions that use technology to improve quality of life, generate income, or expand access to essential services,” stated Salga.
Despite the snub, the Outa CEO hoped the innovation initiative would be fruitful and provide results for municipalities.
“Hopefully, Salga’s Intercity Innovation Challenge will be able to introduce their own reporting tool or solution in this regard,” Duvenage concluded.
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