The eThekwini Municipality has found innovative ways of working closely with local communities to collect crucial information.
The public private partnerships that set the initiative in motion, were sparked by an incident when torrential rains flooded the City and surrounds, last year.
“The Strat Hub” or “the single source of truth,” is a digital system with large volumes of useful data. Its uniqueness is in the innovative way of collecting data and then the type and quality used.
It was developed by the CSIR, eThekwini and Microsoft.
Sandile Mahlaba, Provincial Executive for Microsoft South Africa, said the role of the private sector was well defined. He was speaking at a recently held Smart Cities Summit, organized by DMG events, as part of the Big 5 Construct Southern Africa event.
Moreover, training non-technical people to do the job, was interesting.
Both big Regional incidents, first the July unrest and floods provided an opportunity to pilot the digitization of information instead of documenting on paper.
Dr Sandile Mbatha, eThekwini Senior Manager: City Research and Policy Advocacy, said “we wanted to empower citizens with technical knowledge of where to build and live and where not to. By getting them involved in the data collection process, they familiarized themselves with issues that face their City.”
There is information still not punched into the system, such as water quality test results of rivers and beaches, published elsewhere on the City website.
When the team took over, eThekwini had archaic ways of collecting data that often went missing in the rubble of some 111 pdf docs. Now, try punching in “crashes” on the dashboard of the Hub, and you get all accident spots in and around the City on that day.
It has demographics, projects happening in each Ward.
It even tallies averages, such as average inspections on food, and other environmental health inspections. This is helpful, said Mbatha, to pick up issues of concern before they actually happen. For example, average inspections done, are able to point officials in the right direction, early, before an outbreak such as listeriosis ever threatens that City.
“There are definitely changes in terms of data collection – it is institutionalized and used as should, for planning and informing policy.”