“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
960,000
hits on Yowzit's website
2,500
comments on services
March 2016 End date
July 2017
Issue
During its innovation project, Yowzit’s demonstrated that citizens are willing to review and rate public services on its e-governance platform. However, getting government officials to respond to citizen feedback on its platform was a key challenge for Yowzit.
Although it did meet with several high level government officials, this did not result in greater responsiveness from frontline staff at branches of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Post Office.
Also, Yowzit thought it was necessary to diversify its base, and reach out to the less connected in order to have greater impact.
Project
In the next phase of its project, Yowzit will concentrate its efforts on the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, a socially and economically diverse municipality.
The diversity of the population will allow Yowzit to observe and document how the platform is used by different cohorts of people and refine its approach to meet the distinct needs of disparate groups.
Yowzit intends to partner with local civil society organisations to act as intermediaries to encourage disenfranchised groups to raise their concerns about public services offline and online.
Yowzit also plans to work with senior management of the municipality to integrate its e-governance platform with Ekurhuleni’s complaints management system, and to train staff frontline staff to use the Yowzit platform.
Recently, Yowzit conducted research about the users of its e-governance platform, with the aim of better understanding their experiences of offline engagement with public entities, their expectations of public entities, and their expectations of this platform. Read the practice paper here.
Related projects
Partner
Yowzit is a social enterprise based in South Africa. Its work addresses the factors that inhibit positive citizen-government interaction through: providing reliable information about local government services; providing an open and transparent platform for people to rate and review government offices and services; creating a space for motivated community members to discuss high priority issues and brainstorm solutions; enabling direct and timely communication between citizens and their representatives; and helping local government offices and representatives become more data-driven in their understanding of and response to community priorities.
Publications
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Lessons from Yowzit’s practitioner research and learning…