We aim to provide civil society, media organisations, researcher and citizens with the information that they need in order to promote accountability within government by opening access to municipal financial data.
Government budgets are a blueprint for how public resources are going to be used in order to satisfy public needs. Transparent budgets, expenditure and revenues, and other financial data enable people to access information on the sources of revenue and understand how that money is spent. This empowers citizens to judge whether or not their government officials are effectively spending public resources. Since a significant number of the decisions that affect our daily lives are made at the municipal-level, a focus on municipal financial data provides an opportunity to influence decisions that affect the majority of people.
The National Treasury through its City Support Programme is seeking to open municipal financial data and make it widely available in order to strengthen civic oversight and public accountability as well as to promote entrepreneurship and Code for South Africa has been contracted to assist to this end.
Approach
Understanding the problem space: Accountability Workshops
We invited civil society organisations and journalists across Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town to join us and National Treasury representatives in unpacking how best to use the available data to drive improved municipal performance
These workshops helped frame focus areas for the subsequent dataquest
Events across Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town encourage people to work together in teams to delve deeper into aspects of the focus areas surfaced from the accountability workshops
Outputs of these events range from data-drive stories to visualisations and even prototype apps
There is an opportunity for well thought through concepts to apply for grant funding to bring their vision to life
Facilitating mass engagement: Releasing the data
Publishing the National Treasury data in an open and accessible format to encourage continued use of it
Data will be hosted on the South African National Data Portal - data.gov.za
A proof of concept application will be developed to allow people to explore and interact with this data
A proof of concept application will be developed to allow people to explore and interact with this data
An API is being developed to facilitate programmatic access to the data
Educating users
End users (civil society and media) will be how to use the application
Education drives to understand the available data will help socialise this undertaking
