National, Provincial and Local Government is mandated to provide services by the constitution. Many services are provided at physical locations called service points, that the public must be able to access, like clinics, schools, and police stations. Accessibility studies is a key tool in deciding where service points should be located.

Accessibility studies support and improve planning by testing the current access levels (i.e. travel distances to services) and determining areas of need where there is insufficient service capacity to meet the demand for a service or where the service is located too far away from where citizens reside.

The basic building blocks of accessibility studies are:

• Demand - the number of people within the population that need access to the service within a specific geographic area. E.g. How many school-age children in the area for both primary and secondary schools based on official census data.
• Supply - the service capacity- e.g. the number and size of service points available to serve the population. Eg. the number of schools in the area and how many children they can accommodate based on the standards developed for classroom sizes and school size
• The road network - the distance that is travelled to a specific service point. The current distances that people travel to service points.

Part of these considerations is how the population can travel to these services using the road network - for example children must be able to reach school safely. Access to affordable public transport and safe roads must be considered.

Specific services might need to look at more specific factors. For example,

• healthcare services need to consider illnesses that occur particularly often in an area
• police and public safety need to consider the particular crime patterns and statistics

The Department of Public Service Administration has produced guidelines for government departments to assess and plan access to the services that government departments are mandated to deliver. This has step-by-step instructions for the activities that generally form part of the process of deciding where service points will be built. This guide is aimed at supporting planning and technical staff in government, but being aware of the processes they follow can help you engage with them effectively.

On vulekamali’s geospatial data map, you can explore data used for allocating money to specific areas, as well as the facilities available in those areas.

The following examples can get you started:

Equitable share to provinces

Equitable share is the allocation of the main portion of taxes and levies to national, provincial, and local government. Select the indicator from the menu on the left to colour each province or municipality according to how much money has been allocated to them in the financial year.

See the Division of Revenue Guide for more on Equitable Share and the local conditions used to decide how much is allocated to each region. Try the other indicators, some of which are part of the Equitable Share calculation.

Facilities

You can select one or more set of facilities to show on the map using the menu on the right.

When you zoom in to a municipality, you can see the location of each individual facility.

When you click on the facility, you can see their details, like contact information and the number of people they can serve - depending on availability of this information.

• Guidelines - Improving Geographic Access to Government Service Points
• Accessibility Studies - Placing accessibility studies in a South African policy context
• CSIR Guidelines for the provision of social facilities in South African Settlements
• SAPS: Geographic accessibility study of social facility and government service points for the metropolitan cities of Johannesburg and eThekwini 2011/12
• Increasing productivity by optimising access to public services: A geographic accessibility analysis of thusong service centres - DPSA Occasional Papers 2018/19
• REDI3x3 Spatial Inequality Policy Workshop programme 17 and 18 August 2015.pdf
• Geographic Accessibility analysis in relation to Thusong Service Centres (2016)
• Measuring access to government services in the rural poverty nodes of South Africa (2009)
• Access to government services differs between ISRD nodes
• Periodic courts help to improve access to the judiciary in the ISRD nodes
• Police have detailed criteria for selecting sites for police stations (2009)
• SASSA uses accessibility studies to optimise provision of social grant pay points (2009)
• Access norms and spatial information for schools are of national importance (2009)