The South African Local Government Association (Salga) and advisory firm The Global Trust Project (TGTP) will pilot the voluntary Trust Equity Framework (TEf) in up to 18 participating municipalities across South Africa for three years.

The initiative is intended to support stronger municipal trustworthiness, improved service delivery, better stakeholder relationships and more credible local conditions for investment, the two organisations say.

The initiative will include baseline assessment, leadership engagement, implementation support, follow-up evaluation and the development of a public South African Playbook on Trust-Rich Municipalities.

The initiative aims to demonstrate how trustworthiness can be operationalised as a measurable discipline inside local government and not only as a general aspiration.

Salga's 2022 to 2027 Strategic Plan identifies capable and reputable local government as one of its core outcomes.

“Trust is the foundation and goal of professionalising local government. Without it, capability and service delivery collapse,” says Salga.

The pilot is intended to support that agenda by giving participating municipalities a structured way to examine how trustworthiness is experienced across leadership, systems, stakeholder relationships and everyday municipal practice, and how improvements in those conditions may contribute to stronger delivery and accountability, it notes.

The pilot is expected to generate practical learning for participating municipalities and a wider public resource for the local government sector.

“Salga’s role is to strengthen local government through practical support, institutional development and reform-oriented collaboration. This pilot is aligned with that work. It is voluntary, evidence-based and intended to generate useful practice from within the realities municipalities face,” says Salga Municipal Finance, Fiscal Policy and Revenue Enhancement portfolio head Lerato Phasa.

The TEf is an evidence-based framework for diagnosing, developing and embedding trustworthiness in institutional settings. The TEf Trust Equity Index (TEi) provides the diagnostic baseline by measuring trust and performance conditions.

The TEf then addresses leadership development and implementation through practical pathways built around cues, cadences and controls, such as the signals leaders send, the management approaches they establish and the systems that help make those behaviours consistent, says TGTP.

“South Africa’s municipalities are operating under considerable fiscal, governance and service delivery pressure. In that environment, trust cannot be treated as incidental. This pilot is intended to demonstrate how trustworthiness can be operationalised in a measurable way inside local government, and with material outcomes,” says TGTP executive director Dominic Wilhelm.

The underperformance of many of South Africa's local municipalities has been highlighted by government and civil society documents over several years.

The Auditor-General of South Africa reported that in 2023/24 municipalities took an average of 123 days to collect money owed to them, wrote off R50.96-billion in debt and recorded water losses of R14.93-billion and electricity losses of R22.36-billion, Salga says.

National Treasury has also placed local government reform and the review of the local government fiscal framework on its 2025/26 agenda, it adds.