"I'd like to see this summit in every country," South African civic tech CEO speaks at Government Transformation Summit

"I'd like to see this summit in every country," said Eldrid Jordaan, CEO and Professor in Practice as he delivered an international keynote speech at Government Transformation Summit.

Jordaan is CEO and Founder of GovChat.org, the largest civic engagement platform in Africa, which connects citizens to public services through seamless digital tools. He is also CEO of Suppple PLC which provides digital software for public services, currently serving over 63 million citizens.  

Additionally, Jordaan is a Professor of Practice at Johannesburg Business School, driving new thought leadership through his extensive industry experience.   

Jordaan spoke in detail about the success of his GovChat platform, which was recently listed on the Luxembourg stock exchange at £200 million. 

GovChat was developed to provide South African Citizens with knowledge of who their elected representatives are and what they can provide, allowing citizens to report issues, rate services and find their ward councillors. 

Having built up a user base of over 9.5 million South Africans, Jordaan shared the four reasons he thinks GovChat is so successful:  

1. It was developed in a co-creation model with a number of government departments and alongside the UN, meaning real time data from departments is used to inform UN programmes on the African continent. "Co-creation is the currency of relevance" explains Jordaan.
   
   
2. GovChat has a strong focus on access, with the ability to provide a range of functions utilising an intuitive interface. "Accessibility must be built into design" according to Jordaan.  
   
   
3. The ability to scale rapidly is built in as GovChat's technology as it is hosted by AWS cloud infrastructure.  
    
4. Data security and privacy are built into GovChat with data anonymised, stripped of raw information and aggregated, to keep citizens safe.  

Following the success of GovChat, Jordaan shared a number of lesson he has learnt from developing civic technology. He highlights that "interoperability is an non-negotiable" warning "digital transformation fails when departments work in silos."

Furthermore, Jordaan emphasises the importance of persistent engagement with public institutions "every single level" to fully understand citizen's needs and deliver meaningful change. 

Providing an enlightening international perspective, Jordaan's contributions set the focus for future digital transformation across the UK and the world more widely.