Dear South Africa (DearSA)

DearSA is a legally recognised and constitutionally protected non-profit platform which enables the public to co-shape all government policies, amendments and proposals.

Active

Since 2017

South Africa

We’ve run many successful campaigns over the past 18 months and have amassed a considerably large active participant network of over 700,000 individuals across the country and beyond. DearSA is an online participation platform which creates awareness of draft policy amendments at municipal, provincial, national and SOE levels. It also provides an easy-to-use method of immediately engaging with government and submitting comment or suggestion on a policy. Its presented as an objective platform, without bias, to encourage input from all points of view. It is not a petition platform as each comment is individually submitted to government from the user while a record of participation is held by civil society and reflected in a report after closing. Since launching in Jan 2018, we have managed to attract over 700,000 unique participants in various projects and maintain an active participant database of around 450,000. We have been instrumental in shaping a number of policies, from Municipal level (CoCT) to national (Amending Section 25 - where we were responsible for 230,000 individual public comments flooding parliament).