Public finance and governance data resources
National & provincial budgets, procurement, spending
The National Treasury e-Tender portal contains information on advertised, awarded, closed and cancelled tenders. You can also view the Tender Bulletin PDF documents. This means that it does not show smaller procurement such as RFQs by municipalities. Provinces also run their own portals such as Gauteng awarded tenders.
In specific sectors there are dedicated sites, for example for health, you can see the Master Health Product List on the Department of Health tenders page.
Vulekamali packages a large amount of data from National Treasury. This includes data related to:
Provincial and national budgets
Restricted or blacklisted suppliers from Treasury site
Deviations (e.g. single sourcing) and expansions from procurement processes from the OCPO
Procurement plans with the scheduled bids from OCPO
National and provincial infrastructure projects
Also see National Treasury provincial quarterly reports and Stats SA Financial statistics of provincial government disaggregated data.
Public investments and financing
Public Investment Corporation (PIC) is a state-owned company which invests funds on behalf of clients such as the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) and Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Annual Reports include summary information on investments, performance and governance.
Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) has more than 1.2 million active members and assets worth more than R1.61 trillion. Information on investments and performance is available in the annual report and annexures.
Development Bank of South Africa annual reports and financial statements provide some information on projects and investments.
Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) annual reports, financial statements and general reports - which includes lists of IDC-funded business partners and indication of prominent influential persons (PIPs).
COVID-19 Solidarity Fund reporting includes detailed information on project allocations and spending in PDFs.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) South Africa information page has links to financial data including transactions with the fund, credit outstanding and projected payments. General IMF data is here.
World Bank full project list for South Africa.
Small Enterprise Finance Agency (SEFA) annual reports include investment information.
SA SME Fund annual reports are available from the investor relations menu on home page.
Municipal budgets, procurement, spending
Stats SA publishes Quarterly Financial Statistics of Selected Municipalities and the Section 71 financial reporting data is available on the National Treasury website.
Municipal Money provides deep insights into the finances of municipalities on how they source revenue and what they spend it on. This includes data on local infrastructure projects.
Municipalities publish their smaller 'RFQ' procurement requests on their own portals. See this working spreadsheet for a list of many municipal website RFQ and tender pages. Some examples:
City of Johannesburg: RFQs are published as PDFs on their website.
eThekwini Municipality: See here for RFQs and tenders.
City of Cape Town: For the procurement of goods and services up to R200,000, RFQs can be accessed on this portal, but you will need to register to view details. More assistance is available here.
Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality: Formal tenders, formal RFQs and 'tender openings' and awarded tenders.
Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality: Seems to publish a summary of quote requests in a weekly PDF.
Nelson Mandela Bay: Posts information on 'informal' RFOs and tenders
Performance and audits
The Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) manages the Programme of Action portal [link not active] which contains information on targets and agreements by ministers, and tracks performance. DPME also hosts information on the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) and an evaluations repository.
The Auditor-General South Africa (AGSA) provides detailed results for audits conducted on on all government departments, public entities, municipalities and public institutions.
There are three report sections and associated datasets on the AGSA reporting page.
PFMA section contains audit reports on the financial and performance management of national and provincial departments and public entities.
MFMA section, contains similar for municipal entities, including district and metropolitan municipalities.
Special Audit Reports section contains information on ad-hoc investigations.
Municipalities also publish reports assessing their performance according to their own plans, such as through the City of Tshwane quarterly performance reports.
Legislation and laws
OpenBylaws provides digital version of By-laws from a few municipalities around South Africa.
Legal material from South African court cases via the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) and from Laws.Africa.
University of Pretoria publishes consolidated legislation including all amendments for South Africa (as PDFs)
Government Gazettes can be accessed as PDFs as they are published on the Government Printing Works (GPW) website and are searchable on Open Gazettes as soon as they have been uploaded.
Parliamentary and municipal meeting records
Municipality council meetings: See a working list on the availability of municipal records here. Tweet us if you have a correction or more to add. This includes council (and sub-council) meeting agendas, minutes and resolutions e.g. eThekwini and City of Cape Town.
Parliamentary proceedings: Detailed meeting minutes, summaries and presentations from national (and some provincial) parliamentary activity at Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) and People's Assembly (PA).
Provincial legislatures and parliaments publish some information on agendas, motions, tablings and some now have live streams. PMG has pages for provincial legislatures, and some include meeting minutes e.g. Western Cape. Also see legislature websites such as Gauteng and KZN.
Administrative boundaries
Administrative boundaries are critical for elections and other service delivery activities. See data sources for Municipal Demarcation Board (MDB) provincial, municipality and ward boundaries as well as Stats SA 'main place' and 'subplace' information - similar to suburb - on this page.
Elections
Wazimap includes election information that draws on IEC data. In addition to providing various data downloads on candidates and results via its standard interface, the IEC also provides an API for accessing election-related data.
Community-based monitoring
Black Sash and its partners run a Community-Based Monitoring programme collecting data on service delivery by local government and SASSA
Asivikelani is a project by the International Budget Partnership to get feedback from residents of informal settlements on service delivery during COVID
Media
For media-related tools have a look at this list of projects from Media Monitoring Africa.
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