Towards a New way of measuring Service Delivery in Gauteng: Calculating a Fortunate Index
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Schmitz, P.; 2Eksteen, S.; 3de Bruin, S.
1CSIR BUILT ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA Email: pschmitz@csir.co.za
2ESRI SOUTH AFRICA, UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA Email: sanet@esri-southafrica.com
3INNOVATION, TRANSPORTATION, SOLUTIONS ENGINEERS Email: stfndebruin@gmail.com
Abstract
We live in a society where government organizations must provide in some of the needs of communities. If the needs of a community are not met they may feel unhappy and negative towards the government organizations. Such feelings may motivate a society towards criminal tendencies. If government organizations can measure how fortunate a community is in term of goods and services delivered to them they can manage and apply their financial resources to benefit the community. The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology to measure how fortunate a community is in terms of what they perceive as being important vs. what is provided to them by the government organisations and if the government organisations have improved on their service delivery. The perceptions of what respondents consider as being important were determined based on a list of predefined goods and services. The best statistical method to calculate a fortunate index (FI) was identified and evaluated using various statistical methods. The FI for the Census 2001 data were then compared with the FI for the Census 2011 data to determine if government organizations have improved on their service delivery. This research focus on the methodology of developing a fortunate index, and thus only a limited sample size was used to establish what people perceive as being fortunate. To our knowledge a similar methodology has not been developed for South Africa. The FI propose a new innovative way to determine if government organizations provide in the needs of a community.
Keywords
fortunate index; census; community