Lessons from Yowzit’s practitioner research and learning process

Abstract

Making All Voices Count’s Research, Evidence and Learning component provides grants and mentoring support for real-time research, applied by tech for transparency and accountability practitioners, for project learning and improved practice. Practice papers document these grantees’ learning processes. Yowzit is a South African social enterprise that manages rating and review platforms for citizens to share their views on the quality of services provided by public and private entities. Through an innovation grant from Making All Voices Count, it developed ‘Yowzit for Governance’, a website with information on 41,102 public entities that members of the public could review. To understand the factors that drive interaction with such platforms, Yowzit conducted research about the users of this e-governance platform, with the aim of better understanding their experiences of offline engagement with public entities, their expectations of public entities, and their expectations of this platform. The research also aimed to encourage public entities to act upon citizen feedback, and to increase the overall usage of these platforms.