“Access to clean and safe water and sanitation is an undeniable human right.” (SAHRC, 2014)Many people live in extremely harsh conditions in Cape Town’s informal settlements. Rapid urban growth comes with increasingly difficult challenges to maintain the standard of basic service delivery. Communities live with poorly maintained toilets, taps and street lights. VPUU uses the Cityspec mobile technology to help trained community workers report on the status (working or broken) of infrastructure, take photos, and capture GPS data of infrastructure in real-time. The system’s backbone is a cloud-based administration and reporting centre, allowing users to create and track inspections and monitor the status of infrastructure on an ongoing basis. This provides all the information needed for rapid reporting to municipal departments
“Cityspec puts the power of basic service monitoring in informal settlements in the hands of community workers, enabling us to bring about safe, well managed, and socially activated public spaces,” explains Michael Krause, Chief Executive Officer of VPUU.
“Our partnership with VPUU is a model for success. We bring together their experience of working with municipalities and poor communities, with Formula D’s expertise of technology and human-centred design,” says Michael Wolf, Founder and Creative Director of Formula D interactive.The need for an electronic system became obvious in VPUU’s work in 2011, where trained community workers inspected public infrastructure on a regular basis in order to help the City of Cape Town maintain and repair items. Prior to Cityspec, the system was exclusively paper-based, labour intensive, and admin-laden. Furthermore, the original system did not easily collect geolocation