Baladi Platform

The Baladi project at SmartGov addresses the importance of good governance and the need to engage citizens as well as public sector staff in decision-making and planning in order to reflect and react to local needs. It aims at bringing citizens and local governments together to address and solve issues facing citizens on a daily basis. Unfortunately, authorities lack the resources and platforms to do so. SmartGov addresses this gap by providing municipalities with a digital platform that facilitates access to information, consultation, participatory budgeting, and management of citizen and staff responses. The platform will incorporate features that empower citizens and increase transparency of the decision-making process as well as improve the efficiency of decision making and solution implementation of municipalities. Baladi is a cross-platform portal comes along with e-municipality services such as e-forms, e-complaints and other e-services.Baladi offers two roles for governments: one as accepting feedback from citizens (users) and integrating that feedback in the form of real-time change to policies and programs. The second model involves government opening aspects of its policy making suite of tools and engaging civil society in those individual stages. SmartGov conduct rigorous social science research to contextualize the development and implementation of our technology solutions to ensure ownership and adoption by citizens, municipal staff, and council leadership.