Business intelligence solution provider, Synergy Computing, has assisted the City of Cape Town's Community Development Service to implement an Information Systems Delivery Mechanism which is designed to assist management to develop and deliver a core package of services to different communities informed by local need and available resources.
To achieve this it was necessary to utilise a tool which was able to provide powerful information which could be organised in a manner which gives critical insight into the mountain of public data residing in the program's various databases.
In the past, Cape Town had no effective way of working with dissemination of a single version of the data. Previous processes were inflexible and labour-intensive, falling short of the efficient report writing and analysis capabilities users required.
Chris O'Connor, Manager Administration and Finance, Community Development, City of Cape Town, explains: "The community development approach, which focuses on enhancing quality of life by:
. Using public health as a base for the city's development approach (shifting emphasis towards primary rather than curative healthcare);
. Establishing housing as a socio-economic driver; and
. Establishing community facilities and programmes as an instrument for social development and cohesion."
Central to this approach is the clustering of areas and analysis of the different manifestations of poverty in each area.
Following this "Core Package of Services" based on local needs and resources is identified.
It is important for city management to understand and take into account local contexts, local specifications and the ways in which people organise their own lives in the city. There is sometimes a tendency to respond to poverty at the level of a citywide strategy - but this approach is far too broad and doesn't accommodate local specifics.
Service delivery should drive development - and financial and institutional arrangements should follow. There is a tendency for urban management to let financial institutions define the basis on which they establish an agenda for development - this threatens the scope for effective poverty alleviation programmes.
The idea of using "livelihood" as a concept to understand household poverty - this approach takes into account the range of assets that are available to households, including skills levels, social capital and financial resources. Poverty has a spatial dimension and can be disaggregated in a number of ways, including ethnicity, class, gender and age. To develop viable poverty alleviation programmes, the local and spatial specifics of poverty need to be understood. If this is not understood, municipalities can inadvertently hinder access to livelihood through their planning, land-use and building regulations and regulatory frameworks for informal activity in the city.
Municipalities should avoid using static "snapshots" understandings of poverty only as they will run the risk of not capturing the dynamics, which underpin poverty. Understanding the sets of issues and relationships that traps certain households in poverty requires a dynamic understanding of causes and effects over time.
To this end, an Information Systems Delivery Mechanism was commissioned in order to assist the municipality's Community Development Service to develop and deliver a core package of services informed by local need and available resources.
An attempt has been made to obtain "current " information, which is used to compile community profiles as well as serving to indicate the level of the available resources that are available to use when making strategic interventions in areas of greater need.
By using Cognos Visualizer, we could see that living conditions were a serious problem in some areas, and that funds were not necessarily allocated appropriately. Additionally, we were able to view the vast amount of data supporting controversial issues such as crime, HIV/AIDS and teen pregnancy statistics, which can then be used for identifying trends and identify areas which require strategic interventions. In addition, together with the city's institutional knowledge, form the first delivery of the Information Unification Architecture, the software highlights the lack of improvement in certain key indicators, and one to categorise the data differently and to see the changes over time," concludes O'Conner.
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