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Community-generated evidence. Ward-level insight.

Making the invisible visible.

Wakamoso turns community voices into decision-grade data for researchers, businesses, municipalities, and development organisations — delivered through the device people already use: WhatsApp.

Why Wakamoso

Real communities. Real data. Real time.

Most research about African communities is based on national averages, out-of-date census extracts, or hard-to-reach enumerator surveys. We built Wakamoso to change that.

Our platform collects structured evidence directly from residents through WhatsApp — geotagged, consented, POPIA-compliant, and organised into a peer-scrutiny-grade measurement framework. Results arrive as ward-level dashboards, published reports, and API access, so our partners can make decisions on data communities themselves verified.

How the platform works →

20+
years of community-based research through CDI
11
domains in the SACCS Baseline Instrument
Ward
level geotagged evidence, not national averages
POPIA
compliant by design, explicit participant consent
Research programme

One baseline. Multiple lenses. Built for Africa, scrutinised like it matters.

Wakamoso is built on a single, standardised baseline instrument — grounded in more than two decades of South African community research — and a family of interpretive rubrics layered over it. The two named rubrics today are the Simmering Pot (for community-stability risk) and the C3B SDG Alignment Rubric (for ward-level SDG reporting). Live application of the programme runs through the DSTI-funded Mams Radio × Wakamoso series in Mamelodi.

See the full approach

Academic partners

One instrument. Many institutions. Shared validation.

South African community research is fragmented. Every university, every institute, every NGO designs its own instrument, fields it once, and the findings don’t aggregate. The C3B Baseline Instrument is an attempt at a shared spine — eleven domains, sixty scored questions, grounded in South African focus-group evidence and two decades of community work, and cross-walked to the frameworks comparative research already relies on (MPI, Afrobarometer, DHS, MICS, FIES, SIGI, UN SDG).

We are inviting academic partners to do two things.

First, help validate it. Construct validity, domain reliability, cross-population replication, critique of the rubric layer. The instrument will only earn its place through peer scrutiny, and we would rather you find its weaknesses than we miss them.

Second, run it in the communities where you already work. Every fielding returns full study-level data to the partner institution and contributes to a shared ward-level evidence layer for South Africa. No single university can build a national baseline alone. Working together, we can.

If your research programme touches community capability, wellbeing, inequality, SDG alignment, or municipal service delivery, we would like to talk.

Start a partnership conversation

The baseline

The C3B Baseline Instrument

The data layer. Eleven domains, sixty scored questions, grounded in Dr. Mélani Prinsloo's twenty-plus years of community research through Infusion, CDI, Wakamoso and partners. Each domain is cross-walked to recognised international instruments — MPI, Afrobarometer, DHS, MICS, FIES, SIGI, and the UN SDG Monitoring Framework.

Rubric

The Simmering Pot

A diagnostic model applied to the baseline, grounded in relative deprivation theory. It measures community conditions as the coincidence of structural pressure (The Fuel), weakening social and institutional containment (The Lid), and a breakdown between well-formed expectations and lived reality. Intended to identify the type of conditions that make instability more likely, with a six-flag Tier One Survival Floor that overrides the composite in acute cases.

Rubric

The SDG Alignment Rubric

A second, separate reporting rubric over the same baseline. Each C3B question is mapped to SDG targets (not goals) based on construct equivalence, and C3B scores are treated as proxies rather than indicator equivalents. The output is a bottom-up, ward-level SDG signal in precisely the communities where national surveys cannot produce reliable small-area estimates.

Tell us what you need to measure.

Community baseline? Workforce sentiment? Programme endline? Ward-level SDG tracking? We'll scope it, cost it, and route it through the same measurement framework.

Request a demo