Durban student creates app to map SA’s municipal service failures — and the fixes

This city has gone to the dogs! This is the constant refrain from crotchety ratepayers who dodge potholes and suffer through water and electricity outages in eThekwini.

But how bad are things in the city?

Maybe things are actually improving, and querulous residents are too ill-tempered and so worn down by service delivery failures that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

A Durban civic champion with an aversion to protests has developed a novel app that lets people use their cellphone cameras and geotagging to track municipal service delivery across South Africa.

Keyuren Maharaj, a final-year mechanical engineering student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has patented the app and the web-based system known as CityMender­SA after becoming fed up with the perpetual whining about water leaks, broken streetlights and potholes.

He was agitated about municipal maladies, but refused to “stand in the sun waving a placard like a muppet”.

This month, Maharaj launched his app on the iStore. It is also available on Android and via the CityMenderSA website.

Maharaj has done 99% of the work in ­creating CityMenderSA himself. He only learnt to code last year. “You can teach yourself just about anything on YouTube. Besides, I don’t take instructions very well. And I wanted to build something with minimum effort and maximum impact.”

Before he developed the app, Maharaj’s civic activism had him helping to start the Glenwood Ratepayers Association.

He was irked by poor service delivery, but his eyes glazed over when he heard friends and neighbours carping about the same problems. “It’s no use for a ratepayer association to tell everyone what they already know and then tell the City the same thing. We’ve heard about all the problems. Now we need to find solutions.

“We needed a reliable system to log the complaints and track the municipal response. But, more importantly, [we needed to understand] how these issues are managed.”

So Maharaj got cracking, doing just that.

“Residents who are ignored get exasperated. Some try to fix some of the problems themselves, which is noble, but they don’t have a mandate or the expertise in some cases, so they might make things worse.”

Issues are shared on social media, in emails and WhatsApp groups, but there is no reliable, transparent trail of problems and fixes.

Maharaj soon realised that what he was building for Durban could be extended countrywide. “We need a national picture of failures and fixes. The service delivery crisis is not a mystery. What has been missing is visibility – a reliable, nationwide picture of things: what is failing, how often, and what is being done to fix them.”

His community reporting tool allows residents to log data across 4,000 wards nationwide. It helps to coordinate oversight through data intelligence and infrastructure risk management.

Some municipalities have fault-logging systems, but how reliable are they and can they verify, triage and monitor issues?

Maharaj says CityMenderSA offers automatic ward detection. It assigns every issue to the correct ward and municipality without requiring residents to understand administrative boundaries. The result is a live and independent national map of problems with service delivery.

In the past week, 220 faults were logged by 180 users all over the country. Since the system was launched seven months ago, 2,700 faults have been logged, 44% of which have been about potholes. The average resolution time for complaints, across all municipalities, is 101 days.

User priorities are broken streetlights, water leaks, waste and sanitation issues, roads and potholes, public health issues, parks and power outages.

“The information is available directly in the app for public use. Anybody can access the information and get ward-level insights, including active issues, recurring failures, hotspots and historical trends.

“Visibility is accountability, particularly in a system where data is often fragmented or siloed. I want this system to turn complaints into infrastructure intelligence.”

Harnessing AI

Maharaj says the state is missing a trick with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, it can use images submitted by residents to measure pothole size, assess severity and estimate repair costs, converting anecdotal complaints into structured infrastructure data. With water analysis, users can see how many litres are being wasted.

CityMenderSA users are not required to create public profiles, submit ID numbers or provide their residential addresses. Issues are tracked using reference numbers, not identities. The platform uses WhatsApp and email integration to report issues to municipalities and deliver updates and follow-ups to residents via a WhatsApp concierge.

Of course, for a system like this to work effectively, it requires user input. Negotiations are under way to encourage people to report issues as well as provide updates. Rewards could take the form of coffee and grocery vouchers, for example.

Maharaj says some municipal officials have embraced his free-to-use system. Others are wary. But already the platform is being used by private security companies in eThekwini.

“Our relationship is evolving, but it offers us an idea of how the private sector, civic organisations and cities can work together. The main thing is an audit trail. We need visibility, coordination and accountability at scale.”

Maharaj cites an example of how CityMenderSA has worked. “On 9 January at 9:38, a sinkhole was reported on a busy intersection in Durban. It was escalated, and at 12:49 eThekwini repaired it. This issue can be viewed by any member of the public and we can see which municipal teams are in fact working.”

This month, CityMenderSA will issue daily service delivery reports to metropolitan municipalities and weekly reports to local and district municipalities.

For Maharaj, it started out as a modest local project.

“It now offers a unified intelligence platform for cities, integrating advanced machine learning and AI to make service delivery reporting smarter and more transparent.

“Every uploaded photo is automatically scanned and privacy-protected through AI. So are duplicate issues. The idea is to keep reporting clean and accurate. Residents can explore public issue histories, share live updates through public posts and track responses, all while municipalities benefit from the insights.

“If you want to fix a city, you first need to see it. Not in spreadsheets, in reality – from the street, from the sky and across time. If we want to rebuild trust in service delivery, we need a clear picture of what is happening on the ground. You don’t need to wait for the government to innovate.”

CityMenderSA launched in Durban without corporate backing, a formal team or a software engineering background.

Maharaj wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code himself, driven by the belief that transparency empowers communities.

“I’m about possibility rather than pessimism,” he says.

Beyond the platform itself, Maharaj has also drafted a South African Public Infrastructure Technology Standard, which he describes as a national framework proposing how public infrastructure technology should be structured, measured and governed. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.