Dear Residents
We are constantly trying to improve the services we offer to you and we want to make it easy for you to get in contact with us without using the traditional methods which are not always effective.
Service delivery is one of our most important priorities as a municipality. It is therefore important for us to make sure residents are able to report daily service delivery issues on a reliable platform. We were extremely fortunate to enjoy a partnership with Rhodes University and benefit from a pilot project headed by its academics.
MobiSAM (Mobile Social Accountability Monitoring) is a project that uses mobile technology to support two-way communication between citizens and government, on basic service delivery issues. The project aims to support citizen engagement and government responsiveness, through providing various platforms (not only technology based) that citizens can use to engage in social accountability practices. MobiSAM plays a strategic role, as it brings together individual and collective action with real-time access to mechanisms to report issues to all key stakeholders. The MobiSAM technology incorporates both a reporting interface and a ticketing function. Reporting is via a mobile application citizens can use on a feature phone or smart phone, website, or through SMS). The ticketing function is mainly used by the municipality to address internal communication challenges.
MobiSAM allows residents to report a service delivery issue by logging a ticket. To do this, users choose one of six options. These are: Electricity, Water, Sanitation, Parks and Recreation and “other”.
Once the issue has been reported on MobiSAM, Makana’s Customer care and Communications staff assign the ticket to the relevant department and an email is automatically sent to the relevant technicians.
Front-desk staff at the relevant departments will see this log, communicate with the technicians and give feedback to the residents. This will either say the issue has been resolved, or will state why the issue cannot be resolved. The resident who logged the ticket closes it once they are satisfied that the issue has been resolved.
Makana staff have completed their MobiSAM training and are now able to monitor reports, collect data, investigate trends and provide helpful feedback to residents. Registered users will be informed and prepared by receiving SMS updates from Makana Municipality on scheduled and unscheduled outages and other news related to the provision of basic services.
Currently totalling 1471 tickets, the online platform (www.mobisam.net) has assisted residents in reporting specific issues related to the most common service delivery issues.
Coupled with the high volumes of information sent to MobiSAM via the MobiSAM Facebook page and messenger inbox, the interaction between the MobiSAM team and residents has allowed the project to accumulate a high volume of service delivery related data.
For more information about MobiSAM, please visit our blog (http://www.blog.mobisam.net/)
and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/mobisam.net/). To register to use MobiSAM
in Makana Municipality, please visit the website www.mobisam.net
I would like to encourage as many people as possible to use this system because it has great
benefits for both you the resident and for us. Issues you report will never get lost on this
system and you can follow them up by adding comments on MobiSAM. It also helps us to
keep track of issues that are outstanding and those that have been resolved.
Honourable Executive Mayor Councillor Mzukisi Mpahlwa
