SASI SA has been named First Runner-Up for the National Digital Infrastructure Award at the Digital Sovereignty Public Service Awards 2026, presented during SITA GovTech 2026 at the Durban ICC. The recognition is for City in My Hand, the citizen-reporting platform SASI has been piloting with Richtersveld Local Municipality and Namakwa District Municipality in the Northern Cape.
GovTech is the annual government technology conference hosted by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) together with the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies. This year’s theme, Building Towards Digital Sovereignty, asked how South Africa can become the architect of its own digital destiny, and the National Digital Infrastructure Award recognises ICT companies that have put that idea into practice.
A platform built with the community, not just for it
City in My Hand gives residents a simple way to report issues in their area from their phone, follow each report as it moves through the municipality, and see it through to resolution. Behind the app, municipal teams work from a shared console where reports arrive, are assigned to the right department and are updated in real time, so residents always know where things stand.
In Richtersveld, the pilot’s host municipality, the app was launched in Afrikaans, English and Nama, so residents can use it in the language they speak at home. Making the service available in Nama was an important part of the pilot: a citizen app only works if the whole community can use it.
“ICT industry that has implemented sovereign digital infrastructure enabling cross-government collaboration and integration.”
Sovereign by design
From the start, the pilot was set up so that the data belongs to the government that serves the community. Throughout the pilot, Namakwa District Municipality remained the Responsible Party for residents’ data under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). SASI provides the technology; the municipality keeps ownership of, and accountability for, the information its residents share.
That arrangement was agreed openly before anything went live. Alongside workshops on the pilot’s scope, citizen reporting and City AI, SASI ran a dedicated POPIA and legal session with the municipalities, so that responsibilities for residents’ data were clear to everyone involved before the go-live week.
Two spheres of government, one shared platform
The pilot brings a district municipality and a local municipality together on the same platform. Richtersveld hosts the service day to day, while Namakwa District Municipality provides oversight and governance of the data. It is this cross-government collaboration, built on infrastructure the municipalities control, that the National Digital Infrastructure Award was created to recognise.
For SASI, the recognition belongs as much to the teams and residents in Richtersveld and Namakwa as it does to the people who built the software. We are grateful to both municipalities for their partnership, and to SITA and the judges for the recognition.
