Page 8 - UKZN MIMI Report 2025

1. EXECuTIVE SuMMARY
1.1 background to the Municipal Innovation Maturity Index
Evidence around the world indicates that governments are adopting new, innovative ways to deliver services to citizens. Recent advances in science and technology offer governments opportunities to tackle challenges such as poverty and inequality, infrastructure backlogs, and sustainability issues more efficiently. Similarly, municipalities, as the level of government closest to people, can improve service delivery by adopting innovative approaches.
This report introduces and presents results from the Municipal Innovation Maturity Index (MIMI), a decision-support tool that measures and benchmarks innovation capabilities and maturity across South African municipalities. MIMI seeks to measure the capabilities of individual employees and municipalities to learn, implement, adopt, and institutionalise innovations that can improve basic service delivery. It is an initiative established and funded by the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), implemented by the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), and supported by the South African Local Government Association (SALGA).
The desired outcomes of MIMI are to:
• Embed MIMI as a local government sector-wide instrument to assess the capacity of municipalities to innovate and produce periodic municipal innovation practices reports;
• Create awareness about the innovation capacity and innovation performance of municipalities;
• Introduce MIMI as a credible and accessible instrument with maximum support for use as a tool by municipal
sector stakeholders to encourage and benchmark innovation in municipalities;
• Position the use of innovation assessments data as a process to inspire innovation practices and adoption of
innovation in municipalities; and
• Encourage municipalities to plan, invest and implement innovation in their business processes to deliver
value and fulfil their mandates.
MIMI measures innovation in three areas, called constructs:
• Construct A: Municipal Enablers of Innovation
• Construct B: Management Support for Innovation
• Construct C: Individual Innovation Behaviour
From these constructs, municipalities are ranked on maturity levels from 1 to 6, where Level 1 indicates little or no evidence of innovation, and Level 6 indicates the systematic application of innovation.
1.2 Results
The present State of Municipal Innovation Report offers insight in to the use and application of innovation in South African Municipalities. These were the some of the findings:
• The national Innovation Maturity Level for 2024-2025 was 2. Level 2 indicates that innovation is defined and
understood by officials in most municipalities, but there is little evidence of its application.
• The institutional environment in most municipalities remains limited in enabling innovation: few municipalities allocate dedicated financial, physical, or human resources, and political support for innovation is generally lacking.
• In many municipalities, management shows limited support and encouragement for innovation.
• However, findings suggest that municipal officials at the junior and middle level seems to find avenues to use
and apply innovation.
• The City of Cape Town was the top performer in adopting innovation, attaining Maturity Level 4.
• Three provinces – Gauteng, Northern Cape, and Western Cape – recorded the highest average maturity, at Level 3.
• Metropolitan municipalities performed relatively better compared to district and local municipalities.
The MIMI partners are excited to release the 2024-2025 MIMI report. This is the first publication that provides a model for the production of more robust reporting on the state of municipal innovation in South Africa in the coming years.
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MUNICIPAL INNOVATION MATURITY INDEX (MIMI)