Demonstration social audit: Amatole, Eastern Cape

As part of the Provincial Premier's programme to improve government service delivery, CIETafrica won a public tender to demonstrate the dynamics and likely products of social audit in Amatole, one of the province's six districts.

 

The audit, which began in January 2001, covers the "social needs" cluster of services: health, welfare, education and sports, arts and culture. The audit collected information from households in representative communities about people's use, experience and perceptions of service delivery in these four sectors.

"First things first: Implementing Batho Pele: The Amatole district municipality social audit", CIETafrica; 2001 Jul. www.ciet.org (library page, South Africa) Andersson N, Myburg M, Ngxowa N, Merhi S., "How Amatole tries to put people first.", Service Delivery Review 2001,1;14-17 Andersson N, Paredes S, Ngxowa N, Matthis J. , "Social audit of provincial health services: Building the community voice into planning in South Africa", Journal of Interprofessional Care 2004; 18(4): 381-390.

CIETmethods:

 

The cross design of social audit and evaluation techniques known as the CIETmethod, also known as sentinel community surveillance (SCS) or service delivery surveys (SDS), tries to maintain epidemiological coherence while introducing the results of surveys for discussion between communities and planners.

 

The method relies on a panel of sentinel communities chosen and weighted to link the sample to the universe it represents. Cyclical contacts with these sentinel sites are effectively a concentration of measurement resources in time and place, an intense focus of quantitative and qualitative methods in a panel of mini universes. The ability to repeat measurement in the same place makes impact estimation relatively straightforward.

 

These households can be contacted in successive cycles, perhaps a year or two years later, to measure differences over the period. These differences can be related to programmatic input and other factors that might be vary across different sites. The impact assessment is based on the time sequence and the heterogeneity between sites.

 

The CIET cross-design usually involves 120 contiguous households in each site to permit the analysis of local factors in the context of household-level occurrences. Some environmental factors might be quantified easily (for example, presence of school, cost of drugs) or they may be more qualitative (adequacy of sanitation, level of participation in community affairs). If these factors affect the whole cluster, comparisons can be made between clusters or groups of clusters.

See CIET methods