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In January 2025 the Gauteng provincial government (GPG) announced the imminent launch of its Local Government Turnaround Barometer Dashboard – an initiative that is set to monitor municipal performance and improve service delivery across the province, if all goes according to plan. The provincial Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) is in charge of the project.
The barometer will track key issues, including water and electricity challenges, financial compliance, and wasteful expenditure, says the GPG. It was introduced following the province’s Local Government Turnaround Summit, held in October 2024, which aimed to address municipal inefficiencies. The event brought together leaders from national, provincial, and local government and experts from the private sector, civil society, and academia.
The barometer will monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as basic service delivery including electricity challenges, local economic development, financial compliance, wasteful expenditure, and water monitoring, among others. It will also ensure accountability and transparency in the use of public money, and scrutinisation of tenders awarded by the municipality.
Currently, the province’s KPIs are monitored manually, which is outdated and not aligned with modern systems, said Cogta MEC Jacob Mamabolo.
Proactive response to challenges
“The view of the provincial government at that point [the October summit] was that because the problems are not new and they’re not unique to one municipality over the other, we need to then find a way of bringing all the municipalities together and bring the province to work with the municipalities and with national,” said Gauteng Cogta spokesperson Theo Nkonki.
“We believe the problems there cannot be solved by just one sphere of government … that’s why we need a much more coordinated and strategic intervention.”
Nkonki believes the innovation will help government to act proactively to address problems and challenges.
“Municipalities will tell you how important the prompt intervention by all spheres of government is, working together to make sure that all those challenges we face are dealt with timeously.”
It will also mean that local government does not have to wait for audits to reveal problems. “We need something that will house the information from all the municipalities … so that we don’t wait until the auditors get involved later in the financial year … our intervention as Cogta is to support municipalities but how we’ve been doing things previously is that we would wait for that audit period and then that’s when we would get to understand and learn that these problems exist and our support was very haphazard.”
The technology is powering decision-making at the GPG, Nkonki added. “So our decisions now are no longer made only through gut feel and hunches, but we are using compelling data from the municipalities themselves to make decisions and then we will check ourselves as we move forward.”
The project also aligns with the provincial aim to digitise all government services.
