The use of quick-deploy digital tools, rather than paper forms, was the secret to the rapid government response to the devastating 2022 KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) floods. This was the key takeaway from the keynote address delivered by Sandile Mahlaba, Microsoft’s Public Sector Provincial Executive, at the recent Power Up with Power BI for Africa Summit held in Sandton on Thursday, 28th August 2025.

Organised by skills training leader iFundi in partnership with IT consulting firm Ousadia Consulting, the summit focused on leveraging data analytics for impactful change across the continent. Mr. Mahlaba’s speech served as a powerful testament to the value of digital readiness in saving lives and informing billion-rand recovery efforts.

The Crisis of Data Collection

Mr. Mahlaba, a veteran of over 20 years in government digital transformation, challenged the audience to look beyond the slick final dashboard.

“We were in a crisis, hospitals, houses, people disappeared, floods everywhere. Nobody knew what to do, how to do it,” Mahlaba stated. “One thing we jumped on was, ‘we can’t think of using data if there’s no way of collecting the data’.”

He explained that the initial hurdle was not analysis, but the logistical impossibility of traditional, paper-based data collection. This method typically took two months before any visualization or analysis could begin, a fatal delay in a disaster scenario.

The Power Platform Solution

To overcome this, Microsoft collaborated with the provincial government to deploy a rapid, structured data collection system using the Microsoft Power Platform. This enabled immediate tool deployment, where simple tools like Microsoft Forms were tailored instantly from basic spreadsheets to collect critical, on-demand data on fatalities, damaged infrastructure, and community needs.

A full-stack solution, which encompasses a comprehensive package of front-end and back-end technologies, was seamlessly integrated with the broader Power Platform family to facilitate rapid data harvesting and processing, demonstrating the ability to transition from ‘crisis to visualization’ within a day.

Collected field data was channelled into a central repository, or ‘Hub,’ which aggregated local and national data sources. This single source of truth allowed the KZN province to coordinate emergency calls and make informed decisions from a single, consistent platform.

The Power BI Billboard

Mr. Mahlaba described Power BI as the “billboard” of all the hard work, showcasing its essential role in translating raw, chaotic data into strategic action for senior officials.

The resulting dashboards provided government decision-makers, from the Mayor to the President, with instant insights, including Heat Maps, used to visualize the exact locations of the most pressing problems; Damage Quantification, highlighting the monetary value of damage caused to public assets, including critical infrastructure like hospitals and schools; and Strategic Planning, informing crucial long-term decisions on where new hospitals should be built, what kind of disease control campaigns to implement, and where to focus reconstruction efforts.

“That is the vision that is what we’re driving with this government client: to make sure that they’re not just using data for the sake of data, they’re using data to make decisions that are critical today in front of them,” Mahlaba concluded.

The keynote strongly reinforced the summit’s theme, proving that digital readiness and accessible technology are now non-negotiable foundations for accountable, effective, and crisis-ready government operations in Africa.