GRA at a citizen participation workshop
The Grahamstown Residents’ Association (GRA) attended a MobiSAM workshop this week in preparation for the launch of MobiSAM 2.0 early next year. A wide range of locally based civil society organisations participated in the workshop.
MobiSAM is mobile phone based project aimed at increasing citizen participation in local government.
The project will invite Makana residents to use their cellphones to lodge service delivery complaints which can then be conveyed to the appropriate municipal authorities. There will be a special app for people with smartphones, while those with older model phones will be able to send in their grievances using an SMS service.
MobiSAM plans to make extensive use of social media and a website where residents will be able to track not only their own complaints, but also those of other residents. For example: if a user lodges a complaint about a power outage, he or she will be able to check online to find out whether other residents in the immediate neighbourhood have the same problem.
When discussing the type of complaints that might be registered, the civil society groups produced a litany of reasons why they are dissatisfied with the municipality.
Most of the criticisms were related to the municipality’s core businesses of providing power, water and sanitation, refuse removal and road maintenance.
Earlier in the week, the MobiSAM team had a similar strategic workshop with members of the Makana administration. Their plan is to combine ideas from the civil society and Makana workshops in preparation for a joint planning ses- sion for an effective roll-out of the MobiSAM project.
MobiSAM identified three main objectives of their project: 1 It should support a two-way communication between citizens and government. 2 Transparency and accountability in the spirit of Batho Pele – people first.
3 It should also support evidence-based civic mobilisation and citizen engagement. The MobiSAM project will enable this by showing specific examples of where service de- livery is failing. While the MobiSAM team billed the workshop as a “strategy formulation” exercise, it appeared that the main objective was to convince the various participants to “buy in” to the project. The last few minutes of the workshop were dedicated to eliciting promises from civil society to spread the word about MobiSAM. • Steven Lang is the Grahamstown Residents Association’s media officer and attended the workshop on the organisation’s behalf.