Four lessons in citizen satisfaction at municipality offices

Its been two years now that we have been collecting citizen feedback at different public institutions in Uganda. During this time, we have delivered monthly feedback reports to these offices and noticed that some public offices have used our monthly reports to improve their service delivery. But how can citizens access this data, and how can CSOs and other governments learn from the information we already gathered? We are here to share with you our first public trend report! 

Between September 2019 and March 2020 we partnered with municipal offices in Mukono and Wakiso to collect citizen feedback at their offices. The data was collected by our talented trainees who were stationed at the different service points in Nansana municipal council, Kira municipal council, and Mukono municipal council. A total of 6,630 citizens gave us feedback on their experience at these institutions through on-site interviews. In the trend report, we highlight 4 important lessons. 

• Sudden service delivery changes at municipality offices directly impact on citizen satisfaction and service quality. 

• When citizens go to the local government offices, they go to finance and administration offices but are most satisfied with the community development office. 
• Friendliness of staff, waiting time, and being sent around from office to office have a significant impact on service quality and satisfaction at municipal offices.
• Divisional offices get better rated than municipal offices.

While most citizens complained of long waiting times and the absence of public officers to work on them, in response the public officers highlighted that the nature of their jobs requires them to leave their desks and attend to other pressing matters. To address long waiting times, some municipality heads addressed the issue with their staff.  At one office in Mukono, the average waiting time even reduced from 15 minutes to 3 minutes! From this experience, we see that public institutions are willing to improve the quality of the services they provide by listening to citizen feedback. Read more about satisfaction trends with Ugandan municipality service delivery here.