“Our platform enables government actors to access this information, monitor and benchmark performance, and identify gaps in service from the citizen perspective” — Pramod Mohanlal, Yowzit
2,134
reviews of public services on the Yowzit platform (July 2015)
55,000
citizens engaging with Yowzit every month
January 2015 End date
May 2015
Issue
South Africa’s Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plan has created a demand for tech-enabled solutions to combat widespread governance problems around public services.
The priorities of South Africa’s national OGP action plan include finding ICTs that can help improve public services, fight corruption, and improve accountability and transparency of public officials.
But, while there are clear benefits to using technology to improve public services, there are also challenges to overcome – including how to ensure opinions of the people using public services are heard in monitoring and managing them.
Project
Yowzit, in partnership with New Markets Advisors, is carrying out research to understand how to make sure that the view of ordinary South Africans can be incorporated into the planning and accountability of public institutions.
This research, based around Yowzit's current Making All Voices Count-funded project that enables public rating of government services, is helping to answer practical questions and asks how to reach individuals and groups that have been marginalised by existing structures.
- How and why do individuals get involved with rating and reviewing public services? What obstacles stand in the way of behaviour change?
- What are people trying to find out about local government, and what are they trying to express themselves?
- What information do government officials need to convey to constituents?
- What are the criteria that each stakeholder would use to claim success with an interactive platform?
- What best practices can be gleaned from other e-governance solutions? How can they be leveraged to encourage fast adoption and heavy usage?
Related projects
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Yowzit was established as a private sector venture to connect people to great local services via a comprehensive, easy-to-use platform which they could use to communicate easily with service providers, find where services are delivered, recommend great services, and hold providers - both government and private sector - responsible for weaknesses in performance.
Publications
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Lessons from Yowzit’s practitioner research and learning…