Creating awareness of municipal financial data in South Africa
SA Cities Network held two events to facilitate the engagement about data, accountability and transparency with a varied audience.
SA Cities network held two events, in Cape Town and Johannesburg, aimed at disseminating and sharing knowledge on emerging innovations in urban governance and finance. The workshops informed the audience on existing challenges and proposed solutions that can assist South African cities to combat governance and financial challenges in municipalities. SA Cities Network also wanted to influence the thinking process of all sectors of society that work with cities to promote good governance and management of South African cities; to encourage shared learning and partnerships among various actors to enhance good governance within cities.
Cape Town Workshop
A municipal finance data storytelling workshop was held at Tshisimani Centre for Activists in Cape Town. The workshop attracted a diverse range of attendees including communications experts, journalists, activists, government officials and researchers.
The workshop was structured to teach attendees to develop data stories. First, an overview of the State of the City Finances report was provided and during the presentation by Danga Mughogho, from South African Cities Network, the significance of the links between urban policy goals and municipal finance, and intergovernmental fiscal framework were highlighted. SA Cities then showed attendees various online sources of municipal data and how this data can be explored and analysed. The websites included National Treasury’s MunicipalMoney and metro data from the SCODA website.
Journalism trainer, Asanda Ngoasheng took participants through an understanding of data journalism and data storytelling. Data storytelling was presented in the one day workshop as a methodology for participants to use to engage in the entire research journey, from formulating a question, to discovery, and analysis and insight. By the end of the day, teams presented data stories based on municipal finance data they had analysed.
For example, the team that analysed the financing of city infrastructure looked at whether the missing middle is shouldering the cost burden of city infrastructure. They asked the question in the context of how in changing budget circumstances does government continue to subsidize infrastructure provision. Additional questions that the group grappled with were whether “the rich” are opting out of the electricity grid if consumption is a proxy for ability to pay and is Cape Town’s municipal budget really pro-poor?
Another team worked on the financing of spatial transformation. The team represented people who earn different levels of income and looked at their housing options. Mr A earns R3,500 per month or less and qualifies for subsidized housing. Ms B earns R7,500 to R15,000 per month and qualifies for subsidized housing / FLISP. Mr C earns more than R22,000 per month and if he buys a house it will be from the private housing market. To give their data story more flesh, the team proposed to overlay demographic data to show who is actually falling into these three groups, the distance they live from the CBD, their race, gender, age and percentage that they represent of the total Cape Town population. They would also look at the housing available to each group. For example, which geographical areas the group qualifying for RDP houses would typically receive houses in and whether this is exacerbating apartheid spatial planning patterns.
The team further looked at cities and energy diversity focused on how the different ways of electricity distribution affect the end-user /consumer and their consumption. The team started by mapping out the cost factors associated with different sources of electricity. For example, the capital cost, waste disposal costs, fuel costs and labour costs associated with different energy generation options such as coal, nuclear and renewables. They highlighted an average cost per kilowatt-per hour for coal and solar etc. The team gave an example of how the Johannesburg tariffs for electricity had increased between 28.5% to 69% for the larger consumers/users. They highlighted that there had been a large drop in sales between 2006 to 2014. In other words, consumption dropped when the price went up, which affected local government revenue.
The team suggested that the solution to this phenomenon would be for government including local government and users to find a new mixed method or mixed approach to balance out the issues of cost efficiency, escalating service delivery costs, and provision of electricity at fair prices from all South Africans.
Johannesburg
SA Cities network hosted its second municipal finance data storytelling workshop at Tshimologong in Johanneburg. Amongst the attendees were communications experts, journalists, activists, government officials and researchers.
Attendees participated in a short, structured process intended to create awareness of municipal financial data in South Africa. Journalism trainer, Asanda Ngoasheng took participants through an understanding of data journalism and data storytelling. Data storytelling was presented in the one day workshop as a methodology for participants to use to engage in the entire research journey, from formulating a question, to discovery, and analysis and insight. By the end of the day, teams presented data stories based on municipal finance data they had analysed.
One team analysed the financing of city infrastructure and opted to look at a comparison of the spending of the City of Johannesburg and the City of Cape Town on water infrastructure. This was in the context of drought impacting the cities. The team tracked the trends in spending on water infrastructure over time. The team found that during the year in which Cape Town was dealing with Day Zero where CapeTonians nearly ran out of the water, the biggest infrastructure investment by the City of Cape Town was on a new headquarters.
Another team looked at affordability of municipal bills, especially focusing on tariff structures to determine if they were progressive or regressive to the poor. They found that living in Johannesburg is expensive for the poor and middle class. Poor households pay proportionately more than rich households.
The story that the financing spatial transformation team presented was that municipalities need to think long-term on how things are done. The current funding model of municipalities is disincentivizing spatial transformation and encouraging urban sprawl. Through municipalities seeking a short-term gain in the form of rates from new developments on the peri-urban edge, there is a long-term cost to the municipality in the form of it needing to provide services to those developments that are contributing to urban sprawl. The team, therefore, advocated that municipalities should be prioritizing brownfields developments in the inner city rather than greenfields (new) developments on the periphery.
Another team focused on city energy and analysed the household and city-level impacts of diversifying energy consumption. The team problematized that electricity is promoted as the only energy source that is available. However, they highlighted that there are other energy sources, such as paraffin that are used by households, not only electricity. The team looked at how changing energy consumption patterns affect budgets — in other words how household-level electricity consumption affects city budgets.
Municipalities earn revenue through on-selling electricity to households. Affordability of electricity as an energy source drives household consumption behaviour. When households use less electricity because it becomes less affordable, municipalities earn less revenue. When they diversify to another energy source, such as paraffin, that also affects municipal revenue. When it comes to energy consumption, households are differentiated by income levels. The data that the group analysed was electricity consumption by income level and energy source data.
These two workshops were arranged by the South African Cities Network and the Civic Tech Innovation Network. Imali Yethu Civil Society Coalition, Heinrich Boell Foundation and OpenData Durban came on board as event partners to attract a diverse audience.
SA Cities Network received a grant from Civic Tech Innovation Network to host this event, part of a series of regional peer-learning events.
