By Koketso Mamabolo
In the next couple years South Africa will join countries like Estonia, Brazil, and India in rolling out massive digital public infrastructure which will make a material difference for citizens. As part of the MyMzansi initiative, National Treasury recently launched the pilot of the MzansiXchange platform, a connected data ecosystem which will provide intra-governmental data sharing for service delivery, planning, policymaking, and reporting.
MyMzansi is a roadmap for the government’s digital transformation journey as part of Operation Vulindlela Phase II. Driven by the Presidency, Department of Communications and Digital Technologies, alongside National Treasury, the MyMzansi approach is influenced by examples of digital public infrastructure around the world.
Savings galore
The focus for phase one of the MyMzansi initiative, which will run until 2027, is on “social protection, digital identity, and unified digital channels.” Pilot programmes for government payment and service integration projects and a digital ID system are underway, along with the digital exchange ecosystem, and the initiatives will be scaled up from 2028 across government services such as healthcare and education,
The idea is to integrate data and make it more accessible for the good of the public, consolidating the fragmented data landscape. It has four pillars:
- Data sharing for regulation, compliance, and verification
- Data sharing for evidence-based policy, planning, and research
- Data sharing for operational analytics
- Open (public) access for sharing
MzansiXchange began as the South African Data Lake (SA-IDL) and builds on two initiatives.
The first is the National Treasury Secure Data Facility (NT-SDF), a collaboration between National Treasury, SARS, and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics under the SA-TIED programme.
The second is the Spatial Economic Activity Data South Africa initiative which has given local and provincial government access to anonymised tax data as part of National Treasury’s Cities Support Programme.
MzansiXchange builds on from the work already done by creating one platform for all services, providing personalised support and allowing for citizens to enter their data only once, speeding up future processes.
Through their own data exchange platform, Estonia was able to save on over 1 300 years of work time. Brazil saved billions of rands.
Read the full story in the G20 edition of Public Sector Leaders
Sources: National Treasury | MyMzansi
