South Africa has made serious strides in open government: commitments under the Open Government Partnership (OGP), national portals like Vulekamali, Municipal Money, and GoMuni, and now an open data sharing framework being piloted across key municipalities. Yet, in a recent interview for the OGP Results Report, I found myself coming back to a simple tension:
We are publishing more data than ever before — but for many municipal officials and residents, it’s still not helping to fix the broken streetlight.
This is not a critique of open data. It’s a critique of how we frame impact. The Limits of “Publishing More Data” Platforms like Vulekamali and Municipal Money are valuable for researchers, journalists, and accountability advocates. They aggregate complex, technocratic information and surface it in ways that can support scrutiny at a national level. But in three years of working closely with multiple South African municipalities at Open Cities Lab (OCL), something has stood out:
- These national fiscal transparency portals almost never come up in our work with municipalities.
- Municipal officials are not asking for help to use Vulekamali or Municipal Money.
- Their most urgent data problems sit much closer to the ground.
It’s not that the portals are “bad” or that officials lack “budget literacy.” It’s that the portals are rarely relevant to the daily decisions municipal officials and residents have to make. For most residents, it is not especially useful to know that a large share of spending is allocated to “governance and administration.” What they want to know is:
- Why are the lights still off on my street?
- Why was this road not budgeted for?
- Are the faults I report actually reaching anyone?
- Does my input at community meetings ever show up in the budget?
For most officials, especially at local level, their immediate problems sound more like:
- “We can’t link our IDP to our budget because our ERP modules are too expensive or fragmented.”
- “We are collecting data in multiple systems, but we can’t see a unified picture of what’s happening.”
- “We’re reporting to national treasury, but we ourselves struggle to access or integrate our own data.”
In other words: publishing more data at the top does not automatically translate into better decisions at the bottom. Budget Literacy Is Not the Core Problem In the interview, I was asked about budget literacy: is the low usage of these platforms a sign that citizens and officials don’t understand public finance? My experience suggests a different diagnosis:
- Municipal finance teams often understand their own budgets in far more detail than any national portal can express.
- Citizens are not disengaged because they are “illiterate” about budgets; they are disengaged because the data offered to them is not aligned with their lived questions.
We’ve seen promising work in this space from organizations like the International Budget Partnership, who use formats like WhatsApp to distill complex budget information for people living in informal settlements. But even there, the most powerful work is not “explaining a portal”; it’s connecting money to lived realities: informal settlements, basic services, and local infrastructure. So instead of asking, “How do we make people understand Vulekamali?” we might ask:
“What information do residents and officials actually need in order to influence and improve budgeting and service delivery — and how do we design data systems around that?”
That is a very different starting point. The Real Data Crisis: Fragmentation and Interoperability Across a community of practice we’ve supported with 10 municipalities, one answer has been remarkably consistent: when you ask, “What is your biggest data challenge?” the word that returns, in different forms, is always:
Interoperability.
Municipalities are drowning in systems:
- Different line departments (electricity, water, waste, housing) each use their own proprietary platforms.
- Foundational datasets are locked inside vendor systems; in some cases, municipalities must pay to access data they themselves have generated.
- Senior leadership lacks an organizational view of performance: costs, outcomes, targets, backlogs.
Imagine running a business where:
- Finance can’t easily talk to operations,
- Customer support systems don’t speak to billing,
- Leadership can’t see a simple integrated dashboard of performance.
That’s the data reality for many municipalities. This is why, at OCL, we have become almost evangelical about data standards and data governance:
• Common data standardsare the invisible infrastructure that make everything else possible: better planning, AI, analytics, evidence-based decisions.
• Data catalogs help municipalities simply answer: What data do we have? Where is it? Who owns it?That alone can take a year in a large metro.
• Interoperability is what allows a resident’s identity, fault reports, and service history to be verified and reused across departments, instead of getting lost in silos.
If OGP is looking for high-leverage interventions, this is one of them. Not more dashboards; better foundations. From Top-Down Transparency to Bottom-Up Problem Framing The current OGP commitments — fiscal transparency portals, open data portals, open data sharing frameworks — are important. But impact will be limited if they remain primarily top-down, supply-side exercises. A more transformative approach would start bottom-up:
- Ask municipal officials directly: Where are your biggest pain points in budgeting, planning, and service delivery? Where does data get stuck? What information do you wish you had at your fingertips?
- Ask residents and civic actors: When you engage your councillor, or report a fault, what feedback do you get? What information would actually help you hold your municipality to account — and participate meaningfully?
- Design open government commitments around those answers: Support municipalities to standardize and govern their data internally. Invest in interoperable systems rather than bespoke, siloed applications. Use open data not as an end in itself, but as a byproduct of well-governed internal data.
In other words, let the frontline define the theory of change, and let open data and transparency follow, not lead. A Call to Reframe “Success” in Open Government None of this is an argument against portals like Vulekamali, Municipal Money, or GoMuni. They matter — especially for national-level accountability, research, and oversight. But if we are honest about the crises facing local government — failing infrastructure, disaster risk, service breakdowns — then we need to ask harder questions:
- Are our transparency efforts changing how decisions are made in municipalities?
- Are they helping officials and communities prevent disasters, not just analyze them after the fact?
- Are we investing as much in data standards, interoperability, and internal data governance as we are in new portals?
Open government is not just about making information visible. It is about making systems work — for the councillor trying to escalate issues, for the official trying to plan with incomplete data, and for the resident who just wants the lights back on. If we can align our transparency agenda with those lived realities, then the next generation of OGP commitments in South Africa could move from “open by default” to “effective by design.”
AI declaration: This article was written by OtterAI exclusively from an interview transcript with the OpenGovPartnership (OGP).
