You can build highways and hospitals, deploy fibre networks, and modernise fleets but without trust, none of it holds, writes Gugu Nyanda, health and public service lead at Accenture, Africa.
Around the world, citizen confidence in government is collapsing. Studies show that fewer than half of people globally trust their national governments to do what is right. As faith in institutions declines, so too does compliance, engagement, and legitimacy.
To reverse this trend, governments must treat trust as critical infrastructure – a system that requires deliberate construction, ongoing maintenance, and vigilant protection, much like roads, energy networks, or digital connectivity. The blueprint is clear: radical transparency built on open data, robust sustainability reporting, and inclusive, participatory governance.
It is time for public leaders to embrace transparent public data not as a compliance burden, but as a strategic tool to rebuild credibility and earn citizen confidence. We need a coordinated effort across national, provincial, and local spheres to make government more visible, more accountable, more open to scrutiny and collaboration. Trust is no longer a byproduct of performance. It is the platform on which effective governance is built.
At its core, transparency is a signal of integrity. When governments openly publish performance data, fiscal reports, and real-time metrics in plain language, they show that they have nothing to hide.
In Brazil for instance, the national Transparency Portal allowed citizens to track every government transaction. Within three years of its launch, convictions on unlawful activities jumped by over 60%. In Jacksonville – Florida, a new suite of “transparency dashboards” opened daily service data from waste collection to emergency response times resulting in higher service efficiency, citizen engagement, and over 600 staff hours saved. These are not isolated wins. They are proof that when government makes its data public, people re-engage.
Transparency also matters for how governments manage crises. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ability of health ministries to publish timely, accessible data on cases, hospitalisations, and vaccine rollouts made the difference between informed cooperation and widespread mistrust. The US Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ “Open Payments” initiative, which tracks financial ties between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, reinforced ethical oversight and reassured a sceptical public. In short, open data saves not just resources it safeguards reputations.
But transparency is not just about responding to crises. It is equally vital in building long-term public value, especially around service delivery and fiscal accountability. Citizens want to know: Where is my tax money going? Why is my water meter still broken? What’s being done about potholes or poor school results? Governments like Estonia and Uruguay have led the way with user-friendly budget portals, allowing every citizen to follow the money. In Ghana, the Audit Service launched a mobile app enabling users to monitor public spending.
In South Africa, this is the next frontier for state capability. We need to go beyond legislative reporting requirements or sporadic press releases. Departments must deliver real-time public data that tracks everything from procurement to school attendance, waste collection to clinic wait times.
Open contracting portals, public service dashboards, and participatory budgeting platforms must become the norm. And crucially, this transparency must be paired with follow-through when a problem is highlighted, government must be seen to act. Without that link, transparency becomes hollow and risks deepening cynicism.
Equally vital is the role of sustainability and climate reporting. Citizens are increasingly judging governments not only on present-day services, but on their stewardship of the future. In West Hollywood, California, a public-facing Climate Action Dashboard tracks the city’s progress toward carbon neutrality by 2035.
These dashboards do more than inform they create public pressure for results, and bring communities into the fold. As countries move to meet their Paris Agreement obligations, this type of transparency will be essential in showing that targets are not just rhetoric, but measurable commitments.
But open data is not enough on its own. It must be accompanied by genuine citizen participation. Participatory budgeting, pioneered in Brazil and now practiced in over 7000 cities worldwide, allows citizens to directly allocate portions of municipal budgets. Studies show that this can boost public trust by over 20 percent. When people help make decisions, they feel more ownership and are more likely to see the state as responsive rather than remote.
Transparency is not a single initiative. It is a culture. It is how government conduct itself when no one is watching and how it welcomes people to watch anyway. It turns government from a black box into a glass house. And while that may feel risky, the bigger risk is continuing behind closed doors while trust evaporates.
So here is the call: let us build a Trust Infrastructure Strategy – a cross-government commitment to public data transparency, sustainability reporting, and participatory governance. Let each department and municipality identify five high-impact indicators to publish monthly. Let the Treasury lead on a fiscal transparency portal accessible to every citizen. Let public dashboards track not only performance, but responses to complaints. Let climate data, school results, and procurement contracts be open by default. Let trust be treated not as an afterthought, but as infrastructure essential, strategic, and long overdue for investment.
The future of democracy depends on more than ballots. It depends on whether citizens believe their governments are honest, capable, and on their side. Transparency is how that belief is rebuilt one dataset, one dashboard, and one decision at a time.