September 2017 | By International Budget Partnership South Africa
Governments often experience social audits as a challenge to their authority. As a result social audits often push government, the people and civil society further apart. This short film tells the story of how residents, elected officials, administrators, and civil society organizations worked together to improve sanitation in Wattville, near Johannesburg in South Africa.
Work done by Planact, the Social Audit Network, IBP South Africa, and the government of Ekurhuleni led to faulty portable toilets being replaced, improved relationships between government and residents, and a commitment to scale up a collaborative approach to social accountability. Watch the video below, or click here to watch on YouTube.
Related Resource
Access to information is one of the biggest challenges organizations that try to engage in the budgets of local governments in South Africa face. Some of the key documents are not published and the formal access to information machinery seldom brings the desired results. For this project, IBP South Africa, Planact, and the Social Audit Network used a networking approach to access the information they needed. This graphic explains how they did it.
- Access to Information: Finding the Right Municipal Official (September 2017)