KZN student’s CityMenderSA app tracks SA’s infrastructure failures & uncovers Jozi’s hidden water losses – Keyuren Maharaj

CityMenderSA was created by KwaZuluNatal engineering student Keyuren Maharaj to help residents report and track local infrastructure problems, an idea sparked by his experience chairing a ratepayers’ association in Durban. He told BizNews that the app began as a simple tool for documenting service delivery failures but has since grown into a national platform covering 36 categories of issues across South Africa.Reports logged on the app are escalated directly to municipal councils, with updates and followups managed through features like WhatsApp integration to encourage faster responses. Maharaj stresses that user privacy is central: the platform collects no personal data beyond the WhatsApp phone number. With AI now built in, CityMenderSA can estimate realtime water loss from leaks and analyse patterns across municipalities. When Maharaj ran the algorithm on seven months of Johannesburg data, even the small sample of issues logged on the app revealed hundreds of thousands of litres of water lost. Bootstrapped from the start, CityMenderSA is already available in Afrikaans, Zulu and English, with more African languages on the way. Maharaj describes it as a “virtual butler for service delivery.” Once an issue is logged, he says, users know it’s being tracked, increasing the chances it will eventually be fixed.

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