MobiSAM aims to get residents and municipality in touch

E-governance project MobiSAM is gearing up to start up again in a new format, and with a new approach, from September this year. But they’ve asked for residents' help.

MobiSAM (Mobile Social Accountability Monitoring) started in 2011 at the height of Grahamstown’s water outages. It aimed to provide an effective way for the municipality to effectively update its citizens on scheduled and unscheduled outages and give residents a way to effectively report problems directly to Makana.

Through mobile phones, MobiSAM provided an avenue to report water-related problems directly to the municipality for registered users in addition to receiving updates directly from the municipality.

MobiSAM also included a mobile polling application that allowed individuals to voice their opinion, rank their most pressing needs as well as the quality of service delivery. Between 2011 and 2014, MobiSAM managed to sign an MoU with Makana, register a number of users as well as collate a lot of information from residents by way of polling.

Due to the high turnover in the leadership of Makana Municipality, MobiSAM decided to pause its operations to restrategise and think of a better approach to strengthening communication between local government and citizens.

This week MobiSAM has announced it is back with a new approach to capacity building in the municipality.

“We realised that our initial approach was quite adversarial, and didn’t gain much traction from within the municipality,” said developer Hannah Thinyane. “MobiSAM version 2.0 is different – instead of hoping that pressure from us citizens will compel the municipality to provide better services, our new approach aims to strengthen the communication strategies of the municipality internally first, and then externally with the residents.

“It is much more holistic this way, as the approach identifies and builds on the current situation within the municipality.”

According to their media release, the MobiSAM that resumes in September will allow registered users to:

• Report service delivery problems using any type of mobile phone.

• Receive important service delivery information/notices or responses to reported cases directly from the municipality.

• Collate and visualise reported problems so that all registered users can monitor reported cases.

•Inform the municipality about your service delivery needs to assist with local government planning..

The MobiSAM team has asked for the public’s help. To tailor the application to better meet residents’ needs MobiSAM is conducting a survey which can be completed online.

They will also be administering questionnaires throughout Makana.

“So if someone from the MobiSAM data collection team stops you, we would appreciate your support,” Thinyane said.

The link to the online survey is below or visit MobiSAM’s facebook page ( www.facebook. com/mobisam.net) or twitter account (@ MobiSAM_Net)

http:// goo. gl/ forms/ GwC7JJwE5HRrPhwR2

Our new approach aims to strengthen the communication strategies of the municipality internally first, and then externally with the residents