Our work with affected communities has highlighted the systemic manner in which the agency of individuals and collectives within communities have been eroded and how, through a systemic programme of legislative prescriptions, power within communities to decide on their well being,governance and developmental paths has been stripped away. The Social Audit methodology was particularly important for us, as it allowed communities to engage in the hard work of rebuilding activism and agency in ways that did not reduce communities to passive recipients of handouts.

The project itself has maintained strict parameters in terms of accountability of all participants, both vertically and horizontally, based on the understanding that it is through our individual and collective actions that we learn how “to become”. What we do, matters, and through building accountabilityinto our projects, we not only hold duty bearers to account, but also ourselves and the activists wework with are able to hold us and themselves to higher standards.This baseline report only includes the outcomes of the surveys from 8 communities in Mpumalanga, Gauteng, North West, Limpopo, Northern Cape, the Free State and KwaZulu Natal.