By Jonathan Mbiriyamveka
Harare — President Emmerson Mnangagwa has officially launched the Citizens Engagement and Scoring Platform, a digital system that allows residents to rate their local councils online, with citizen scores set to count for more than 40 percent of each authority’s official performance grade.
Speaking at the Rainbow Towers Hotel on Thursday before an audience of mayors, town clerks, residents associations and development partners, President Mnangagwa framed the initiative as a defining moment for Zimbabwe’s governance.
“Today, we are not merely launching a digital platform but deepening our democracy and participatory governance,” he said.
The platform represents the final piece of a reform sequence begun in 2023 with the “Call to Action — No Compromise to Service Delivery” Blueprint, followed by the Minimum Service Delivery Standards that transformed that blueprint into “concrete and measurable benchmarks”.
The scoring system covers eight service categories: water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, roads and public lighting, corporate governance, public health, environmental stewardship, and housing and social amenities.
Each carries its own 2030 target, formalised through Statutory Instrument 170 of 2025.
Dr John Basera, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works, told the gathering that the ministry will gazette fresh targets every September to align with local authorities’ budgeting cycles.
Zimbabwean-developed technology
The platform was developed by young innovators from the Harare Institute of Technology, whom the President singled out for praise.
Engineer Tererai Maposa, the lead developer, demonstrated the system’s 24-question instrument during the launch and had the audience score Harare in real time.
The resulting dashboard showed solid waste management as the best-performing category at 83 percent, against 45 percent for water supply, 44 percent for sanitation, and 44 percent for roads and public lighting.
A demographic breakdown showed respondents aged 18 to 24 registering the highest satisfaction of any age group, while women’s average satisfaction lagged men’s, at 2.39 out of 5.
A separate filter for the 19 participants with disabilities returned a score of 2.7 out of 5.
The platform’s built-in AI model generated its own analysis of the Harare results, finding that three-quarters of respondents rated water-quality satisfaction as poor and describing the pattern as a “systemic issue” rather than an isolated complaint.
Its recommendation: consider privatising water management and commission a feasibility study into outsourcing water-quality monitoring and treatment to a private operator.
Citizen feedback now decisive
Citizen responses will carry more than 40 percent of an authority’s final blended score — “a deliberate tilt,” in Dr Basera’s words, toward giving “the residents, the citizens in fact, a say in terms of the policy tone and the policy direction as we journey into 2030”.
President Mnangagwa tied the platform’s design to the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy launched earlier this year, saying AI-driven analysis of the platform’s data would help “propel reforms” and strengthen trust between citizens and the state.
He closed by inviting citizens to “embrace this system and hold local authorities accountable”.
Local Government and Public Works Minister Daniel Garwe, speaking earlier in the programme, pledged the ministry’s continued commitment to the no-compromise agenda and to rejecting, in his words, “land barons,” “Sabhuku deals” and the creation of new informal settlements.
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