Understanding your local government should be easier.

When a party promises to change something, how easy is it to find out whether they achieved what they promised, and, more importantly, how easy is it to hold them accountable?

Answering that means understanding who is responsible for what. It also means finding out what parties stand for, reading their proposals, and making sense of how those proposals relate to the place you live. It means knowing what services are available, who is paid for what, and what work was actually done.

Much of this information is public. But it is spread across websites, manifestos and lengthy documents. Finding an answer can take time, patience and knowledge you shouldn’t need before you’ve even started.

We believe people should have an easier way to understand their choices.

We're starting with the 2026 local government elections. Find your ward, explore the candidates standing in it, and read published material about your local choices.

Our role is to help you explore and understand. The judgement remains yours.

After that, we plan on helping ordinary South Africans hold their local representatives accountable. We're going to add data tracking service requests, tender awards, municipal plans and more. All public data, sourced and accounted for, but accessible and easy to use.

You should be able to check what you read on Civi. We link information to its source, identify missing material, and don't rank or recommend parties or candidates.

For the current election cycle, Civi draws on published party manifestos, chapters, summaries and related documents. In candidate comparisons, manifesto positions include source links when we have them; manifesto overviews link to their underlying documents through the sources panel. Where information is unavailable, we say so.

Civi is built and operated by Lexi Software, as a corporate social initiative. We intend to spin Civi off into its own NPC and eventually operate as a public benefit organisation.

We’re building it around a belief that accessible information can help people participate more meaningfully in the decisions affecting their communities.