Citizens get a vote on service delivery
…as ED launches engagement and scoring platform
STAFF WRITER
President Emmerson Mnangagwa launched a digital platform on Thursday that lets residents rate their local councils online, with citizen scores set to count for more than 40 percent of each authority’s official performance grade.
Speaking to an audience of mayors, town clerks, residents associations and development partners gathered at the Rainbow Towers Hotel on Thursday (today), President Emmerson Mnangagwa framed the launch of the new Citizen Engagement and Scoring Platform as something larger than a piece of software.
“Today, we are not merely launching a digital platform but deepening our democracy and participatory governance,” he said, adding that the system would strengthen “accountability and responsiveness of local authorities both in urban and rural areas.”
Government, he said, exists to serve its people, and the platform was a practical expression of that principle.
The President placed the launch within a reform sequence he has been building since 2023: first the “Call to Action — No Compromise to Service Delivery” Blueprint he launched on 1 November that year, then the Minimum Service Delivery Standards that translated that blueprint “into concrete and measurable benchmarks.”
The new platform, he said, completes that sequence by giving every Zimbabwean “the opportunity to provide feedback, identify service gaps, and evaluate efficiency in real time” — proof, in his words, that government is “walking the talk” on its pledge to leave no one and no place behind.
He singled out for praise the young developers from the Harare Institute of Technology who built the system, and tied its design to the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy his government launched earlier this year, saying AI-driven analysis of the platform’s data would help “propel reforms” and strengthen trust between citizens and the state. He closed by inviting citizens to “embrace this system and hold local authorities accountable.”
The mechanics behind that pitch were laid out earlier in the programme by Dr John Basera, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works, who told the gathering — addressing the President throughout as “Your Excellency” — that the platform sits on top of a benchmarking exercise the ministry ran against service delivery standards in upper-middle-income economies, the bracket Zimbabwe is aiming to join by 2030.
That exercise produced eight service categories — water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, roads and public lighting, corporate governance, public health, environmental stewardship, and housing and social amenities — each carrying its own 2030 target, formalised in law through Statutory Instrument 170 of 2025.
Dr Basera’s said the ministry would gazette a fresh instrument every September from now on, setting the following year’s targets to coincide with local authorities’ budgeting cycle: 2027 targets this September, 2028 targets in September 2027, and so on.
What is new, Dr Basera said, is how those targets get scored. Since 2021, local authorities have been assessed under a Performance Contracting Framework combining desk reviews with site visits.
The Citizen Scorecard now adds a third, decisive input: residents’ own ratings, gathered through a link sent to a representative sample of each local authority’s population, answerable on the web or via chatbot.
Citizen responses, he said, will carry more than 40 percent of an authority’s final blended score — a deliberate tilt, in his words, toward giving “the residents, the citizens in fact, a say in terms of the policy tone and the policy direction as we journey into 2030.”
Data, he assured the audience, stays on government-run servers at the ministry’s own high-performance computing centre, addressing data-sovereignty concerns before they were raised.
To prove the concept, Engineer Engineer Maposa of the Harare Institute of Technology walked the room — some 900 to 1,000 delegates — through the platform’s 24-question instrument, then had the audience use it to score Harare in real time, with Basera fielding the questions as a stand-in respondent.
The resulting dashboard, filtered for Harare, showed solid waste management as the best-performing category at 83 percent, against 45 percent for water supply, 44 percent for sanitation and 44 percent for roads and public lighting. A demographic breakdown showed respondents aged 18 to 24 registering the highest satisfaction of any age group, while women’s average satisfaction lagged men’s, coming in at 2.39 out of 5; a separate filter for the 19 participants with disabilities returned a score of 2.7 out of 5.
The platform’s built-in AI model then generated its own reading of the Harare results, finding that three-quarters of respondents rated water-quality satisfaction as poor and describing the pattern as a “systemic issue” rather than an isolated complaint. Its recommendation: consider privatising water management, and commission a feasibility study into outsourcing water-quality monitoring and treatment to a private operator.
Dr Basera told the President the finding tracked with a direction Cabinet has already endorsed elsewhere — pointing to the city’s existing arrangement with Geo Pomona Waste Management on refuse collection, and a separate partnership with Helcraw Water on water production, which he credited with lifting daily output at Harare’s treatment plants from roughly 300 to 350 megalitres.
Opening the formal proceedings ahead of the President’s address, Local Government and Public Works Minister Daniel Garwe welcomed Vice President Kembo Mohadi — with First Vice President Constantino Chiwenga acknowledged in absentia — Defence Minister and ZANU-PF national chairperson Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, Harare Metropolitan Province Minister of State Charles Tawengwa, and deputy ministers Benjamin Kabikira and Albert Mavunga.
He told them the platform was the latest milestone in what he called the Second Republic’s reform trajectory, tracing the same lineage Mnangagwa would later invoke — the 2023 Call to Action blueprint, followed by the Minimum Service Delivery Standards — and arguing that citizen participation in scoring local authorities was itself anchored in the Constitution’s principles of devolution and decentralisation, “leaving no one and no place behind.”
Closing on a sterner note, Minister Garwe pledged the ministry’s continued commitment to the no-compromise agenda and to rejecting, in his words, “land barons,” “Sabhuku deals” and the creation of new informal settlements, before inviting Mnangagwa to the podium to deliver the keynote address and formally launch the platform.
Whatever the platform eventually does to council budgets and performance contracts nationwide, its first verdict was delivered within minutes of being switched on: a room full of Harare’s own residents rating their water supply barely above failing, with the system’s own algorithm recommending the city look outside government for the fix.