Reimagining global trust: when truth isn’t enough

Trust is no longer just a social virtue. It is the operating system of modern society.

Whether navigating a job search, accessing a social grant or questioning an election result, citizens rely on public data to make life-altering decisions.

Yet across the globe, this trust is eroding. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 80% of people distrust information they encounter online. By 2030, 90% of humanity will be digitally connected but half will lack confidence in the systems that connect them. Trust has become both a currency and a casualty of the digital age. South Africa is no exception.

In 2022, fake notices claiming that social grants would be suspended or reduced went viral on Facebook and TikTok, sparking widespread panic among vulnerable households. Despite SASSA’s swift clarification, the misinformation revealed a deeper problem: when public data is unclear or inaccessible, trust quickly unravels.

This erosion of trust is more than reputational. It is a barrier to investment, a risk to democratic stability and a threat to inclusive development. 

The South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that mistrust in public institutions and data has cost the country R10 billion in annual investment and reduced GDP growth by 0.5%.

Statistics South Africa is internationally recognised as the continent’s leading statistical agency. Whilst in the 2022 Census and its most recent account of the nation it had a very high undercount, it transparently provided an account of where and how it got the high undercount and accordingly adjusted for this global record in undercount of population where estimates of undercount are undertaken.

However, the recent out-of-the-blue public discourse of unemployment, including attendant reactions by influential figures, has highlighted a persistent challenge: not limited to the credibility of the data itself but unfounded allegations on methodological flaws, in how it is explained and understood across society.

This misplaced critique by some in business and in politics is damaging for absolutely no sound science and represents deliberate smirching that will make the grey listing South Africa has had look like a kindergarten picnic.

It undermines a credible and deserved opportunity to leverage statistical excellence as a means of bolstering public confidence and deepening civic participation. The situation is compounded by a long history of policy fatigue.

Since 1994, more than seventy national development strategies have been launched but fewer than 15% offer publicly accessible closeout reports, according to a 2024 policy implementation review by the African Journal of Public Administration.

These reports may exist in government archives or departmental repositories but their inaccessibility feeds perceptions of opacity and weakens accountability. In any healthy democracy, information must not only be available but also understandable.

South Africa does not lack good institutions.

It lacks systems that convert institutional excellence into public confidence.

As the digital age accelerates, the need to rebuild trust in data, governance and institutions grows more urgent.

But doing so requires more than digital tools. It demands public intelligibility. That is where artificial intelligence, if ethically governed, offers a real opportunity. 

Emerging technologies can help turn information into interpretation and interpretation into interaction.

Yet they must be deployed not just for automation but for inclusion. For instance, mobile-first dashboards could simplify national statistics into plain-language summaries, charts and visual explainers.

With over 80% mobile phone penetration in South Africa, scalable access is feasible. Ghana.Gov’s digital platform drove a 20% rise in public engagement.

In rural areas, where 43% of people remain offline, community-based “data ambassadors” could offer low-bandwidth formats in schools, clinics and cooperatives, drawing on models proven in Rwanda and Kenya.

Other opportunities include AI-powered scorecards that track delivery, performance and budget discrepancies across departments.

Rwanda’s use of public performance scorecards improved district delivery by 25%, while Kenya’s Presidential Delivery Tracker provides a live view of government performance.

In South Africa, Auditor General and DPME systems could be enhanced in similar ways, turning technical reports into simplified, citizen facing updates.

However, technology alone will not rebuild trust. That is why a national data literacy effort is needed to close the gap between statistical production and public understanding.

According to the Human Sciences Research Council, only 35% of South Africans can interpret basic statistical information.

This knowledge gap allows misinformation to flourish and reduces the public utility of even the most rigorous data.

Bridging this divide would involve three key interventions: First, simplified digital dashboards, aligned with multilingual and mobile access, must be designed to meet people where they are. Second, civil society and public institutions can partner to train “community data ambassadors” who explain government information in offline and under connected spaces. Third, youth engagement tools, such as AI-powered chatbots, could be embedded in schools and civic education programmes, making national data interactive, understandable and engaging.

Research shows that data-literate citizens are 30% less likely to spread misinformation and far more likely to engage constructively in civic life.

Boosting national data literacy from 35% to 50% by 2030 is both feasible and transformative. It would also counteract the growing threat of AI-generated disinformation, deepfakes and digitally enabled manipulation.

Economically, the stakes are high. McKinsey estimates that trust-enhancing reforms could add $3 trillion to global GDP. In South Africa, restoring public confidence in government data and performance could unlock billions in investment, improve budgeting transparency and reduce the social costs of disinformation.

Metrics matter. Dashboards, citizen feedback tools and real-time transparency indices, continuously updated, could help track government performance, institutional reliability and civic confidence.

These are not distant ideas. Rwanda’s governance benchmarks and the AUCPCC scorecard have already demonstrated that trust itself can be measured.

Sceptics may argue that South Africa lacks the infrastructure, political alignment or financial capacity to pursue such a path. But this view underestimates what already exists.

The country has five undersea fibre-optic cables, a growing digital talent base and internationally respected institutions such as Stats SA and the CSIR.

It has strong privacy legislation in the form of POPIA. And it has civic platforms like Vulekamali already proving the appetite for accessible data. Trust does not require perfection. It requires participation.

As the G20 confronts rising digital inequality and public scepticism worldwide, South Africa can lead not just in technological capability but in democratic design. The future will not belong to the most connected. It will belong to the most trusted.

Nomvula Zeldah Mabuza is a Risk Governance and Compliance Specialist with extensive experience in strategic risk and industrial operations. She holds a Diploma in Business Management (Accounting) from Brunel University, UK, and is an MBA candidate at Henley Business School, South Africa.

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