Dr Udesh Pillay Executive director

The multi-disciplinary Centre for Service Delivery (CSD) undertakes scientific research towards understanding and explaining the dominant trends in service delivery provision.

What we do

Post-apartheid policy in South Africa has focused on the effective and efficient delivery of services to the majority, particularly rural African inhabitants, who have historically been deprived of basic essential services such as water and sanitation, housing, electricity and health facilities. Scientific research towards understanding and explaining the dominant trends in service delivery provision for human development is critical, as is analysing and generating practical solutions to problems of planning and administration.

In formulating strategies - through a series of 'demonstration' projects - to help mitigate the service delivery problems in South Africa, CSD works to fulfill the following key objectives:

• to conduct scientific research into the nature of and key trends in South Africa's system of service delivery (leading and lagging regions, access to services by the poorest, sequencing of different services, etc.);
• to undertake action research to diagnose and address service delivery challenges;
• to undertake local case studies in which various approaches to improving service delivery are assessed, modelled and alternatives considered through a number of pilot interventions; and
• to provide practical conclusions and solutions to the continuing problems of achieving universal access, sustainable services and quality services.

Working in multi-disciplinary teams and using a systems approach, CSD will test multiple service delivery interventions in a series of localised pilot studies at 'demonstration sites', making possible evidence-based determinations of what works and what does not. Recommendations from the localised case studies will relate to, for instance, how inter-governmental relations need to be structured to optimise implementation; how budgets need to operate; how capacity development can be achieved and enhanced; and how the users (also called 'clients' or 'citizens') need to be understood and mobilised to optimise service planning and delivery.

CSD's research approach is an 'implementation-oriented' partnership one, in which the central research team will work closely with multi-stakeholder reference groups and implementation networks. The work of CSD raises the prospects of partnerships with locally-based research institutions, as well as research agencies in other parts of Africa.