Towards a new way of measuring service delivery in Gauteng: Calculating a Fortunate Index

Abstract

We live in a society where government organisations must provide some of the needs of communities. If the needs of a community are not met, they may feel unhappy and negative towards government organisations. Such feelings may motivate a society towards criminal tendencies. If government organisations can measure how fortunate a community is in terms of goods and services delivered to them they can manage and apply their financial resources to benefit the community. The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology for measuring how fortunate a community is in terms of what they perceive as important against what they receive from government. The perceptions of what respondents consider important were determined based on a list of predefined goods and services. The best methodology to calculate a fortunate index (FI) was identified and evaluated using various statistical methods. The FI for the Census 2001 data was then compared with that of the Census 2011 data to determine if government had improved on their service delivery. This research focuses on the methodology of developing a FI, and thus only a limited sample size was used to establish what people perceive as being fortunate. To our knowledge a similar methodology has not been developed for South Africa. The FI proposes a new innovative way to determine if government provides the needs of a community.
Keywords: fortunate index, census, community, happiness