This report, which focuses on transparency in local government procurement, presents the findings of a survey of municipal websites. The survey, which targeted 34 selected municipalities, aimed to establish the extent to which municipal websites are transparent about the goods and services municipalities procure. Download the paper.
A key step in carrying out a social audit is the gathering of information from community members using a paper questionnaire. Once this process has been completed, all the data that has been collected using the questionnaires must be recorded or captured in one place. Capturing data or evidence is a critical part of the social audit process, because this allows a community to look at all the data that has been collected as a single body of evidence. Having all the data together will help a community to decide what the findings are, and what recommendations should be made based on the analysis of the findings – an essential step before a community talks to government.
This guide is designed to help social audit volunteers capture on a computer all the social audit data that have been collected on the paper social audit questionnaires. This guide shows how to capture answers in a way that will make it easy to use a computer program
to then analyse the data to provide accurate, clear, and representative findings that can be used to engage with the government.
A social audit is a community-led process where residents compare the service they receive against what is stated in official government documents such as bid specifications, contracts and service delivery schedules. Evidence and experiences are collected, presented and then discussed with government officials.
These guidelines will help you develop a social audit questionnaire that will collect evidence or information that will be easy to capture and analyse, and will provide accurate and representative findings and recommendations that can be used to engage with government.
The most recent census data indicates that about 63 percent of the South African population already lives in urban centers. The country’s National Development Plan has estimated that continued urbanization will increase this proportion to 70 percent by 2030. South African cities have a backlog in the provision of formal housing to poor people and in most cases they are falling further behind. For this reason informal settlements are growing and informal settlement upgrading is becoming an increasingly pressing policy priority.
This brief describes how four South African metropolitan municipalities — Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality, the City of Cape Town, the City of Ekurhuleni, and the City of Johannesburg — finance the upgrading of informal settlements. The authors use draft budgets and other supporting documents to specifically identify allocations to in-situ upgrade projects or programs. This approach was taken in order to exclude spending on other kinds of improvements or services to informal settlements.
By Alta Fölscher (Mokoro, Ltd.) and John Kruger (Oxford Policy Management).
The Eastern Cape Province of South Africa struggles with high poverty, poor public infrastructure, and dysfunctional administrative systems. One result is that the Eastern Cape has the worst health outcomes in the country. This case study illustrates how a South African civil society organization has used its budgetary analysis to advocate for improvements in health service delivery.
The full version, short summary, and one page summary of this case study are available in English.