Over a cup of tea in a cosy kitchen, Hannah Thinyane and Debbie Coulson were having a gripe session about the colour of the water coming out of their taps. Enjoyable as the complaining was, they decided to do something more about the awful, brown liquid passing for water.
Over a cup of tea in a cosy kitchen, Hannah Thinyane and Debbie Coulson were having a gripe session about the colour of the water coming out of their taps. Enjoyable as the complaining was, they decided to do something more about the awful, brown liquid passing for water.
“I wrote a research proposal asking if citizen participation in local government can be increased through the use of cell phones, and three weeks later a funder from the Ford Foundation came to Grahamstown,” said Thinyane. “He heard our idea and immediately decided to give us $200,000 to get going.”
This is how the Mobile Social Accountability Monitoring Platform – MobiSAM – got its auspicious start.
Thinyane lives in one of many parts of Grahamstown persistently plagued with a lack of water. MobiSam allows residents to report problems with service delivery in real-time, allows the municipality to view these reports and to communicate with residents.
Once registered on www.mobisam.net, residents can see what is happening in and around Grahamstown with regard to service delivery, as well as other people’s responses to different polls. “Once you’ve participated in a poll, you have access to pictorial representations of the results,” says Thinyane.
Grahamstown’s biggest challenge is effective and efficient modes and lines of communication. MobiSam remedies this by enabling the municipality to communicate directly with its registered citizenry. “Bureaucracy is a huge problem for the success of MobiSam,” said Thinyane.
Thinyane and Coulson were keenly aware that not everyone has access to Internet-enabled mobile phones; however, the encouragingly high rate of mobile literacy in Grahamstown means that even the most basic mobile phones can allow residents to participate using a menu-driven, SMS format.
“We want Grahamstown to register,” said MobiSAM colleague, Thozi Ngeju.
Ngeju’s role is to facilitate understanding of how the app works, through drama. MobiSAM: the Play is performed at various schools in the location, and tests understanding with workshops after the performance.
Grocott’s Mail and Makana Municipality are collaborators with the app.
Grocott’s Mail’s staff member, Avuyile Mngxitama-Diko, benefited from a practical training session on how MobiSAM works, which Coulson held for the newspaper.
Thinyane’s background is in mobile computing, while Coulson specialised in training citizens to monitor government service delivery at the offices of the Public Service Accountability Monitor. Coulson has a background in English, Philosophy, and has worked extensively at the Centre for Social Accountability.
Coulson is working on a training plan manual for MobiSAM that will enable local civic actors and municipal journalists to engage with municipal processes.
Thinyane believes that citizen participation in local government can be increased through the use of cell phones. “Technology is not the problem, it’s a people problem,” she said.
The aim of MobiSam, in this respect, is to grant full access to municipal workings through what Thinyane called “evidence-based engagement. It’s much better to have “something concrete to take to the authorities, rather than something based on a strictly emotional response,” said Thinyane.
MobiSAM has had offers from four different municipalities wanting to use their platforms, which have been turned down, because of the preference for Makana.
“Countries such as Namibia and Tanzania have shown interest in the app,” said Thinyane.
So far, 296 people have been registered on www.mobisam.net
The Facebook page can be found at http://www.facebook.com/mobisam.net
