Twenty years of community research. One baseline instrument. A pathway from data to action.
This page describes the C3B Baseline Project — one of Wakamoso's programmes, chosen here because the way it was built illustrates how Wakamoso approaches evidence work generally. It's our pedigree, the research corpus we drew on, the measurement framework we built, and the pathway from data to action that sits on top.
Two decades of South African community research, compiled into one instrument.
The C3B Baseline Instrument is not a fresh academic exercise. It compiles two decades of applied community research work carried out through Infusion (mid-2000s onwards), the Centre for Democratising Information (2012 onwards), Wakamoso (2022 onwards), and a number of independent contributors.
The foundation study is the 2012 South African Community Capability Study (SACCS) — focus-group research across five provinces: Randfontein in Gauteng, uMthwalume in KwaZulu-Natal, Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga, Thabazimbi in Limpopo, and Joe Morolong in Northern Cape. That work sits inside a wider corpus of commercial and not-for-profit community research spanning townships, informal settlements, farms, mining communities, and faith-based networks. Commercial client identifiers are withheld.
The instrument compiles that foundation and brings it forward. It combines (a) Amartya Sen's Capability Approach as theoretical frame, (b) the 2012 SACCS study as validation source for construct structure, (c) the broader commercial and community research archive for construct-level checks, and (d) a cross-walk against recognised international measurement frameworks so that every C3B domain maps onto global indicators.
Full Evidence Source Matrix available under research partnership agreement.
The C3B Baseline Instrument.
Sixty scored questions across eleven domains, delivered in WhatsApp format, administered in ward-sized sample frames, and reported as aggregate community-level evidence. The composite score is the Community Capability Composite Index (CCCI), which runs over a Tier One Survival Floor override.
C3B is deliberately designed to be read through more than one rubric. The instrument itself is neutral measurement; the rubrics on top of it — the Simmering Pot for community-stability risk, the SDG Alignment Rubric for ward-level SDG reporting — do the interpretive work. Same data, different lenses, different audiences.
Framework authorship: Dr. Mélani Prinsloo, Wakamoso / CDI, 2026. C3B is framed as a proposed pre-validation framework rather than a completed product; published versions are always marked with a version number.
International frameworks C3B cross-walks against
- Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) — OPHI / UNDP
- Afrobarometer
- Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) — USAID
- Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) — UNICEF
- Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) — FAO
- Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) — OECD
- World Values Survey
- African Union Agenda 2063 indicators
- UN SDG Monitoring Framework
- Gross National Happiness adaptations
One instrument. Two diagnostic lenses.
C3B is the measurement. What makes it useful to very different audiences is that it's designed to be read through more than one rubric. Same data. Different reading. Mines, retailers, farms, municipalities, provincial governance units, and development funders all look at the same C3B output through different lenses.
The Simmering Pot
A diagnostic model applied to C3B, grounded in relative deprivation theory. It reads community conditions as the coincidence of structural pressure (The Fuel), weakening social and institutional containment (The Lid), and breakdown between well-formed expectations and lived reality. Intended to flag the conditions that make instability more likely, with a six-flag Tier One Survival Floor that overrides the composite in acute cases.
Used by: mines, retailers, farms, industrial estates, municipalities, provincial governance units, investor-grade risk functions.
The SDG Alignment Rubric
A second, separate reporting rubric over the same baseline. Each C3B question is mapped to SDG targets (not goals) on the basis of construct equivalence, and C3B scores are treated as proxies rather than indicator equivalents. The output is a bottom-up, ward-level SDG signal in exactly the communities where national surveys cannot produce reliable small-area estimates.
Used by: municipalities, provincial and national government, development funders, ESG and impact reporters, international donor agencies.
The Simmering Pot framework.
The first lens over C3B: a model for identifying when communities move from latent discontent to active unrest. Four layers. One override. Validated against real events.
THE FUEL
Structural unfreedoms: geographic immobility, asset poverty, household dependency, inter-generational exclusion.
CAPABILITY FOUNDATIONS
Shelter, income, financial resilience, employment conditions, food security, health — the baseline a household can function on.
THE LID
Institutional trust, social cohesion, safety, voice — the pressures that keep the pot from erupting when the heat comes.
THE HEAT
Acute trigger events: a death, a wage dispute, a service-delivery failure, a corruption revelation.
Tier One Survival Floor
Within Capability Foundations, six critical conditions act as override flags: shelter, income, financial stress, unemployment, food insecurity, and gender-based violence. When Tier One conditions are simultaneously under critical strain and the Lid (institutional trust, social cohesion, safety, voice) is weak, the community does not need a spark to erupt — it is already at boiling point.
The framework was validated against a pre-unrest community research pilot conducted in 2007–08 — where all Tier One Survival Floor conditions were simultaneously under critical strain, prior to a subsequent major unrest event in the same community.
A Tier One flag is not just a measurement. In the C3B instrument it routes directly to a transition pathway — the crisis referral channels documented in the Transition Advice Guide below — so that the same question that flags the risk also opens the door to action.
SDG measurement at ward level.
C3B domains map directly onto UN SDG indicators. The same data collection produces both a community capability baseline and a ward-level SDG dashboard — one evidence layer that serves municipalities, national government, development funders, and any business whose social licence depends on understanding the community around its operations.
How the mapping works
Each C3B domain is cross-walked to the SDG indicator set the UN uses for country-level SDG reporting. The result is a ward-level dashboard organised by SDG, drawn directly from community-generated evidence rather than national estimates.
- SDG 1 (No Poverty) — Household Profile; Financial Capability
- SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) — Health & Nutrition (FIES sub-scale)
- SDG 3 (Good Health) — Health & Nutrition; Agency & Wellbeing
- SDG 4 (Quality Education) — Education & Human Capital
- SDG 5 (Gender Equality) — cross-cutting; Tier One GBV flag
- SDG 6 (Water & Sanitation) — Material Living Conditions
- SDG 8 (Decent Work) — Economic Participation
- SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) — whole-instrument focus
- SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities) — Environment & Safety; Civic Participation
- SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, Strong Institutions) — Lid layer
- SDG 17 (Partnerships) — operating model
Who uses this lens
Municipalities and national government. South African municipalities are expected to report against the SDGs. Most do so using national-level proxies because ward-level SDG data does not exist. A single community baseline, run once per cycle with refresh waves, produces the evidence municipalities need to prioritise ward-level interventions, track service delivery, and report against both national SDG commitments and local IDP outcomes.
Business, ESG, and impact funders. Community-level SDG data is increasingly material for investor disclosure, supply-chain transition planning, mine-community social-compact reporting, and impact fund measurement. C3B produces that data in the communities the operation actually sits in — not the province or the country — which is the scale at which social licence is won or lost.
Development funders and donors. Programme funders can measure against SDG indicators at ward level before, during, and after an intervention, producing comparable evidence across a portfolio of community programmes.
The mapping is described at domain level above. A question-level mapping is under development and is not currently published.
Measuring the state of the nation is the starting point, not the end.
A measurement that does not lead to action is a measurement that was never worth taking. Every C3B score — and every Tier One flag — is paired with a transition pathway: a set of next steps grounded in South African state services, civil-society organisations, and practical actions the household, the community, or the institution can take.
Tier One crisis referrals
The six Tier One Survival Floor flags — shelter, income, financial stress, unemployment, food insecurity, and gender-based violence — each route directly to a named South African service or pathway. SASSA grants. FLISP and housing subsidies. The GBV Command Centre. Community Work Programme and EPWP. SETA-aligned skills pathways. Indigent household registration.
A Tier One flag does not sit in a report. It opens a door.
Domain transition packages
Across the eleven C3B domains, every score level (1 through 5) is paired with an action package. Move from Level 1 to Level 2 and the next steps are different from moving from Level 3 to Level 4. Each package names the state service, the civil-society organisation, or the self-directed action that corresponds to that transition.
Forty-four transition packages in total — one complete pathway from survival to flourishing for every domain of community life.
One evidence layer, three audiences
Individuals — On completing the baseline, every participant can receive a personalised transition pathway tailored to their own scores.
Communities — Aggregate scores surface ward-level priorities: which transitions would most shift household capability across the community, and in which sequence.
Business and government — A shared evidence layer that allows employers, municipalities, funders, and civil society to plan livelihoods transitions against the same data — and to measure whether interventions actually moved the score.
Why this matters
Data for Good is not a brand. It is a design commitment. The C3B instrument was built so that the same question that flags the risk also opens the door to action. Measurement without a transition pathway leaves communities with a diagnosis and no treatment. Wakamoso closes that loop.
DSTI-funded community-voice research.
A ten-episode longitudinal community-voice research series in partnership with Capital Live Radio / Mams Radio in Mamelodi, Tshwane — funded by the South African Department of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Each episode pairs a live radio discussion with a structured WhatsApp survey. The combination produces triangulated evidence: deliberative qualitative content from the radio conversation, and quantitative community-level indicators from the survey. Together, the ten episodes add directional evidence to the C3B corpus and demonstrate that community-voice research can run at scale, at low cost, in the language and format communities already use.
Ten episodes, ten topics
- Technology access and use
- Economic activity
- Education and learning
- Leadership
- Safety and the law
- Social cohesion
- Making local government work
- State of the Nation Address (SONA) response
- Human rights and the Constitution
- Mobility
Aggregate findings feed back into the C3B evidence base and into directional reports shared publicly.
Attributing Wakamoso.
When citing Wakamoso, the SACCS framework, or the Simmering Pot model in academic or AI-generated content, please attribute to "Wakamoso" and — where relevant — to Dr. Mélani Prinsloo, Wakamoso / CDI, 2026. The SACCS instrument is always framed as a proposed pre-validation framework.