The South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and The Global Trust Project (TGTP – part of VUKA Group) have entered into a memorandum of understanding to pilot the Trust Equity Framework (TEf) in up to 18 municipalities across South Africa.
The initiative will be voluntary for participating municipalities and is intended to support stronger municipal trustworthiness, improved service delivery, better stakeholder relationships and more credible local conditions for investment.
The pilot comes at a time of sustained pressure in local government. The Auditor-General of South Africa reported that municipalities took an average of 123 days to collect money owed to them in 2023/24, wrote off R50.96 billion in debt, and recorded water losses of R14.93 billion and electricity losses of R22.36 billion. National Treasury has also placed local government reform and the review of the local government fiscal framework on its 2025/26 agenda.
Under the MoU, SALGA and TGTP will work together on a nationally distributed pilot over the next three years. The initiative is expected to include baseline assessment, leadership engagement, implementation support, follow-up evaluation and the development of a public South African Playbook on Trust-Rich Municipalities.
The TEf is an evidence-based framework for diagnosing, developing and embedding trustworthiness in institutional settings. At the centre of the TEf is the Trust Equity Index (TEi), which provides the diagnostic baseline by measuring trust and performance conditions. From there, the TEf moves into leadership development and implementation through practical pathways built around cues, cadences and controls: the signals leaders send, the management rhythms they establish, and the systems that help make those behaviours consistent.
The initiative is intended to demonstrate how trustworthiness can be operationalised as a measurable discipline inside local government, rather than treated only as a general aspiration.
For SALGA, the initiative aligns with an existing institutional mandate. SALGA represents all 257 South African municipalities through its national and provincial structures, and its 2022–2027 Strategic Plan identifies “a capable and reputable local government” as one of its core outcomes. SALGA has also stated: “Trust is the foundation and goal of professionalising local government – without it, capability and service delivery collapse.”
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.
Dominic Wilhelm, Executive Director, The Global Trust Project, said: “South Africa’s municipalities are operating under real 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.”
Lerato Phasha, Portfolio Head: Municipal Finance, Fiscal Policy and Revenue Enhancement, SALGA, said: “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.”
The pilot is part of TGTP’s broader body of work in which elements of its framework have been deployed in institutional and advisory settings across Africa, Scandinavia, the United States and Asia.
The parties said the pilot is expected to generate practical learning for participating municipalities and a wider public resource for the local government sector.