Grant Awarded To Project Lungisa – Cape Town SA

We are delighted to announce that we have awarded a grant of £12,000 to Cell Life towards project Lungisa.   Lungisa – which means “fix it” in isiXhosa – will provide a platform to enable Cape Town citizens to send text based, audio and video reports outlining challenges in service delivery.  Participants will be able to report using SMS, Twitter, MXit, email and web.  Any resident of Cape Town can submit reports, though the project’s focus will be on townships and informal settlements.

The delivery of services such as water, sewage, electricity, schooling, policing and health care remains a clear priority in South Africa. Eighteen years after the first democratic elections, progress has been made in expanding access to those who lack it, but in many townships and rural areas in particular too many people continue to go without basic services or receive services of a poor quality.

Lungisa will therefore provide a much needed community monitoring mechanism. It will make it much easier for citizens to report issues to government officials and to obtain information they need about social services.  Lungisa will channel reports– by making phone calls or through email, fax, or Twitter – to those government officials in different departments responsible for the issue at hand.  Critically for the first phase of the project, the City of Cape Town has agreed to partner and collaborate with Lungisa, which make it easy for Lungisa to channel reports to and follow up with the City’s existing reporting and response systems...