The App That Puts Potholes on the Map: How AR is Forcing Accountability in SA

Imagine pointing your phone at a cracked pavement and watching a floating, digital marker pop up right over the crack, detailing when it was reported and who’s responsible for fixing it. This is no longer a futuristic dream but a South African reality, changing the frustrating game of reporting municipal faults.

A groundbreaking local app, CityMenderSA, has officially launched what is believed to be the world’s first publicly deployed augmented reality (AR) feature for community service delivery. It’s a tool born not in a Silicon Valley lab, but from the all-too-familiar frustration with potholes, broken streetlights, and uncollected rubbish.

A Global First Forged from Local Frustration

The brain behind this innovation is Keyuren Maharaj, a University of KwaZulu-Natal mechanical engineering student and community activist. He built the entire platform from scratchover 300,000 lines of self-taught codeout of a personal need to see problems get fixed.

“For the first time anywhere in the world,” Maharaj explains, “residents can point their phone’s camera at their surroundings and see real municipal faults as floating AR markers exactly where they exist in the physical environment.”

The timing is potent. As South Africa prepares to host global leaders, this homegrown solution showcases African youth innovation at its best: cutting-edge technology built locally to solve real, everyday problems.

How It Creates Unprecedented Transparency

The app does more than just AR. It’s a full-service accountability platform. Residents can report issues, track them in real-time, and access information in English, isiZulu, and Afrikaans. But the AR feature is the true game-changer.

It creates a single, undeniable source of truth. Residents, councillors, and municipal officials all see the same data, visually pinned to the exact location. This eliminates the common run-around of “we can’t find the fault” or “it wasn’t reported properly.”

“Officials no longer need on-site briefings to understand an area’s challenges,” says Maharaj. “They can simply open the app and see every reported issue in AR, anchored to its exact location.”

Democratizing Accountability for All

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of CityMenderSA is its commitment to accessibility. The app is free for the public, ensuring that everyone from wealthy suburbs to informal settlements and rural towns has the same powerful tool to hold local government accountable.

In just four months, the platform has grown organically across South Africa, with over 1,600 issues logged. It’s a testament to a deep public yearning for transparency. By changing the way people see the faults in their city, CityMenderSA is empowering them to demand a better one.

{Source: Timeslive}

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