PARI Local Government Programme
South Africa’s municipalities have long been plagued by poor service delivery and governance. This has only been worsened by a lack of accountability and transparency that has persevered despite vigorous protest and resistance from civil society.
PARI, an African research institute focused on governance and institutional performance, is doing pathbreaking work that is showing how open data can improve delivery and policy design of municipal services.
Open data is licensed data in a machine-readable format that anyone can access, use and share for any purpose they choose. This means the data can be transformed, combined and analysed freely by all sectors of society. This is key in a country where public participation is the bedrock of local democracy and citizens require easily accessible, understandable information to hold municipalities to account for appropriate use of resources and service delivery.
As part of the drive for an open data platform for local government, PARI has been collaborating with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) to pilot an Open Data Editor (ODE) in South Africa. The ODE is a free, open-source tool designed for people who work with spreadsheets but do not code. It is lightweight, privacy friendly, and built for low-resource settings and offline use; and recognised internationally as a digital public good.
Over the past decade, PARI’s team has assembled financial, economic, social and demographic data from 257 municipalities. ODE is helping PARI turn years of these scattered municipal records into a single, reliable resource that supports evidence-based local governance and transparency frameworks that already exist within local government.
The ODE also comes with a free online course, so anyone can rapidly learn how to effectively apply ODE for their purposes. By participating in the global cohort testing ODE, PARI also joins a wider movement to democratise data and AI literacy. Using ODE, researchers, nonprofits, data journalists, activists and public servants are able to detect errors in spreadsheet datasets without advanced technical coding skills. This capacity-building pilot will feed directly into PARI’s Local Government programme by producing a clean, shareable database that local officials, researchers and community groups can trust and use to advocate for a fairer democratic state. .
Local Government Programme Lead Jugal Mahabir stewards this integration. Mahabir says ‘Municipal financial data in South Africa is notorious for its lack of accuracy due to poor municipal reporting. A tool like the ODE can play an important role in improving data management across the reporting value chain, if there is uptake of such a tool by municipalities and data collecting agencies.’
OKFN’s pilot demonstrates how thoughtful tools and practical training can turn fragmented municipal records into a public asset that advances open, responsive and evidence-led local governance, a metric on which South Africa still ranks lower than its peers.
The global Open Data Inventory (ODIN) ranking set of 197 countries is dominated in the top-10 by ASEAN, Scandinavia and the UAE and includes countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Oman. African countries that rank highly are Burkina Faso and Morocco at joint-24th with Ireland, and Senegal at 33. Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria trails much further behind at 78, 83 and 96 respectively. And South Africa is way behind many of its regional counterparts at 115.
Rwanda’s well-fabled development success story is in partly due to rapid policy rollout and tech-positive governance. Its advanced open data framework is available through initiatives like the Ministry of ICT and Innovation’s Open Data Portal, which aims to centralise public data.
Rwanda’s system aims to create a central repository for public data to increase transparency and accountability. It allows for visualisation and data-sharing between ministries including geographical satellite data, demographic, economic and environmental data.
One case study from PARI’s recent work in this area specifically deals with enhancing fiscal governance and transparency and is a good example of how the ODE can impact the workflow of an organisation working to better serve the public.
PARI also offered a training course for municipal administrations using municipal financial data, budgets, expenditure figures, including financial data in Section 71 of the Municipal Finance Management Act (Act 56 of 2003). Data accuracy is a technical prerequisite for sound research and analysis for such administrators.
PARI’s Local Government programme consequently handles a vast array of complex municipal data, alongside budgets, and deals with adjustments; outcomes tracking; and data on rates for services like water, electricity and sanitation. It also has capital budgets and debtors analysis on infrastructure projects and municipal financial performance.
Before ODE, the process for collating and validating this data was overwhelmingly manual. Analysts would download PDF and Excel submissions and spend days using conditional formatting and manual checks to align data across different years and municipalities and identify errors like empty cells, incorrect naming and misaligned columns.
This manual method was slow and also prone to human error, with mistakes inevitably slipping through. This cumbersome process created a bottleneck for PARI’s crucial work, which includes supporting the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group intervention in the City of Johannesburg municipality with budget analysis and engaging in a national review of the local government fiscal framework, as part of the South African government’s review of the 1998 White Paper on Local Government.
The adoption of ODE has had a tangible impact on PARI’s efficiency and the robustness of their policy and research work. Dramatic time savings were realised by streamlining and automating error detection from processes that took up to three days manually – freeing up time for more strategic thinking. Data credibility was also vastly improved by ensuring the trustworthiness of the data underpinning analyses and recommendations.
These outcomes show the potential to improve the entire ecosystem of public financial data, especially if municipalities themselves used ODE to quality-check their data before submission to the National Treasury – improving the quality of the data collection at the national level.
Better data collection could also inform high-stakes policy interventions and reviews over time.
While pilot studies such as those undertaken by PARI and ODE are promising, globally, empirical evidence is still evolving about the degree to which open government data can improve transparency, accountability, enhanced public engagement and value creation. The journal Telematics and Informatics (2021) contends, for example, that attention should be paid not only to making datasets available but also to the needs, preferences and technical capability of those using these data.
The development of improved and open data sets alongside real-world testing PARI is undertaking is therefore crucial to understand how actors and institutions interact with open data, related technologies and governing policies to collaborate on producing social and commercial value.
