Innovator Q&A: amandla.mobi’s Koketso Moeti
The founder talks innovation, success, learning, and chasing scale at the influential community advocacy NPO.
Koketso Moeti is the founder and executive director of amandla.mobi — a non-profit community advocacy organisation that works to empower communities to raise awareness and enact change on the issues that matter most to them.
Their stated goal is to “turn every cellphone into a democracy building tool so that no matter where you live; what language you speak or what issue you care about, you can take action with others”. And their primary weapon of choice is petitions and awareness campaigns.
One of their most prominent and successful campaigns to date was the petition to stop the “virgin bursaries” (the uThukela District Municipality’s ‘Maidens Bursary Award’) which has over 17,000 signatories.
Q. To your mind, what is the most innovative thing about the amandla.mobi platform?
The creative use of technology to amplify the work of those being silenced and ignored, and to bring critical social issues to the foreground is a significant way of democratising digital tools.
Tech is not going to disappear. We need to harness it creatively to build the world we want, rather than leaving it solely to those whose only interests are profits, exploitation and worse. And this is where we are innovating, we didn’t build something new. We merely took the same tech that could’ve been used in all these other ways and used it differently. This is innovation, which is often conflated with invention.
Q. How do you measure yourselves and campaigns? What constitutes success for a campaign?
Basically success for a campaign is having a decision-maker take a decision we want them to and implement it, like when we got eTV to broadcast ‘Miners Shot Down’. That was very clear, simple success.
We also have campaigns like when we forced the Department of Higher Education to release the ‘No Fee Varsity’ report. The initial ask of the campaign was just for the report to be released. We felt this was important and that it affirmed and strengthened the #FeesMustFall struggle that was happening at the time. [Success for a] campaign [like that] means having your first victory, and then moving the energy to a “next ask”, like implementation.
Other internal measures of success include measuring the number of people who join more than one campaign, and go up the ladder of engagement by taking more and deeper actions, such as directly contacting a decision maker; contributing to a submission; donating to a particular tactic; advising us on campaign tactics; hosting a meeting or other kind of event; attending a protest; and so on.
There are some side benefits we don’t quite measure which can also be important, like how some campaigns raise awareness about things that are often ignored, or just even put new information in the public domain.
Q. How do you facilitate transitions from a successful petition campaign to real change in the world?
How we choose to have the decision implemented varies from campaign to campaign, depending on the issue. For example, the ‘Miners Shot Down’ broadcast was easy to implement. It was getting the commitment to do it that was hard. Likewise our successful campaign to stop the racist Penny Sparrow’s attempts to crowdfund for her fine. [We petitioned the crowdfunding site to remove the campaign,] and little oversight was required to ensure this.
But an issue like the youth desks in the City of Ekhurhuleni depended on those in the area taking the lead to ensure and monitor implementation. Another example is our campaign to have R5 assault rifles removed from public policing (a campaign which we worked on with Gun Free South Africa). While the rifles have not been used since, we are looking for ways to ensure that this isn’t arbitrary and is systemic. Hence we are working with partners who bring the expertise to monitor implementation. Partnerships — with those affected by an issue, and with experts working on it — are very important in such campaigns, as they bring the research capacity, lived experience, proximity to monitoring implementation, and so on.
The tactics and partnerships required depend on the type of campaign. Some are ‘rapid response’ campaigns, responding to values aligned, immediate issues brought to our attention in the news or by our members, and others are long-lead campaigns, which take time and which require ‘moments’ to be exploited to re-energise or ‘moments’ to be created by us.
Q. You’ve managed to reach impressive scale quite quickly. What contributed to that? What advice would you give about achieving scale to other civic tech projects?
Our work is very data driven. We do a lot of testing both of tools and messaging. As clichéd as it sounds, testing and iteration are key components of our work, and I cannot stress enough how important this is.
Q. What advice would you give to other South African civic tech startups? Or, put another way, what do you wish you had known when you started?
Data always matters! Don’t test simply because it’s something that needs to be done. Test knowing that you will be really trying to understand and work with the story the results tell you. It’s not about you and your knowledge, it’s about what you’re hearing from those you are serving.
Q. When Mxit closed, you lost a big portion of your user base. How did you bounce back from this major blow? What did you learn from that experience?
It affirmed our view that mobile tech is volatile, forever changing and one must constantly stay looking ahead. You meet people where they are, but also stay looking forward to where they are heading. And while it’s something we know and regularly practice, at that point we missed the mark. We managed to find some of the members on other platforms, but not many and partly because the blow led to a major paralysis on our end. That would be a key learning from this, I think: how we respond to massive failures and the need to act fast to salvage what we can.
Q. Do you have a process for documenting learning’s in your organisation?
Unfortunately not! We are a very reflective team, but have not managed to systemically document our learning — which range from learning’s about the tech to even about our organisational structure.
[Having a systematic learning process] so would help a lot, especially when inducting new staff because very few people come in with the right mix of skills, so our work also involves intensive building of a talent pipeline in the space.
It’s something we are hoping to address, by having an external researcher spend some time working with us to develop a case study of sorts with the hope that this will get us going in that area.
