Launch of the Toilet Reporting System
By Nkosikhona Swartbooi
Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) and Social Justice Coalition (SJC) have been collaborating on building a fault reporting system that will enable community members to report broken or dirty communal toilets and taps.
We mapped all the flush toilets in Khayelitsha’s (Cape Town) informal settlements using a GPS device. The toilets are geo tagged in the system so they can be easily identified when residents report issues with communal toilets. By using maps we can accurately direct the City of Cape Town’s engineers and maintenance teams to repair toilets when they are damaged.
We are currently piloting the system and have launched the project in RR section of Khayelitsha. The project will be piloted for 3 months in order to see if the system is user friendly to community members.
The two organisations have engaged most stakeholders in the using, cleaning and, maintaining of communal toilets, including SANCO (RR branch), Street committees and community members. Of the stakeholders engaged it is only the City of Cape Town that is unconvinced by the idea. All the others like and support the reporting system initiative.
On the 04 May 2015, SJC members and Ndifuna Ukwazi activists gathered in RR to put up stickers on the flush toilets.
Each sticker has a unique number for each toilet. These numbers correspond with the geo-tagged numbers on the system E.g. toilet 1 = RR001. When community members report this toilet they use “RR001”, which will tell us exactly which toilet is broken and where that toilet is. We then pass this information (as well as detailed information about the actual problem with the toilet) on to the City of Cape Town, who are responsible for fixing it.
The USSD code (like you use for airtime) that community members use when they report is free to them, but will be reverse billed to the two organisations that pioneered the system.
The fault reporting system is now available for use, but only for toilets in RR section. After the pilot phase is completed we will hopefully open it to the whole of Khayelitsha.
