NOW THERE’S A LOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM!

The BuildRSA chat platform is an innovative, proudly South African product that gives you the chance to air your views on developmental issues facing the country and provide tangible solutions to resolving them before they cause degenerative damage.

Over the years, technological advances have meant we can easily access transport on cellphone apps, shop online, have virtual meetings from anywhere and everywhere and so much more. ChatGPT, the latest development in commercial artificial technology, is fast gaining popularity and enables users to complete various tasks, including but not limited to, text generation, text translation, questionanswering and sentiment analysis. BuildRSA on the other hand focuses on harnessing personal agency and saying “what can I do to fix the problems in our country?”

BuildRSA was developed by Priority Performance Projects, which is part of Plus 94 Research, the largest independent, South African and black-owned research company in the country. What makes it different from other social media platforms is that it’s a local product focused on solving problems holding South Africa back.

Dr Sifiso Falala, the CEO of Priority Performance Projects, says BuildRSA is targeted at building our country, meaning building it at all levels; building the culture, excellence and performance in South Africa. “We have benchmarked the work that we do on four very important values namely, problem-solving, which we believe is one of our biggest challenges, global competitiveness, self-love and patriotism,” explains Dr Falala. “We believe the BuildRSA chat forum should be used to collectively, through dialogue, solve our problems constructively. It allows citizens to set the agenda on what’s important and come up with ways to fix our challenges. Leaders can then take a cue from the contributions of society to develop policies and programmes to empower our nation.

“By training children to be globally competitive, they develop winning mindsets and don’t see themselves as subservient to the rest of the world.”

With increased levels of loadshedding, a stagnant economy, water cuts, an education crisis, high rates of unemployment, poverty, crime and corruption, among numerous other challenges facing South Africa, it’s easy for pessimism and despondency to set in. Within this context, the importance of the BuildRSA platform can’t be over-emphasised as it provides a free-of-charge tool for citizens to voice their frustrations and influence positive, sustainable change.

You can access BuildRSA by logging onto https://buildrsa.co.za/ and then registering a username. The platform gives users an opportunity to collectively and constructively problem-solve through dialogue to tackle South Africa’s myriad challenges and move the country forward. The platform aims to promote active citizenry, develop winning mindsets and create a culture of focus, hard work and excellence.