We live in a society where government organisations must provide some of the needs of communities. If the needs of
a community are not met, they may feel unhappy and negative towards government organisations. Such feelings may
motivate a society towards criminal tendencies. If government organisations can measure how fortunate a community is
in terms of goods and services delivered to them they can manage and apply their financial resources to benefit the
community.
The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology for measuring how fortunate a community is in terms of what
they perceive as important against what they receive from government. The perceptions of what respondents consider
important were determined based on a list of predefined goods and services. The best methodology to calculate a
fortunate index (FI) was identified and evaluated using various statistical methods. The FI for the Census 2001 data
was then compared with that of the Census 2011 data to determine if government had improved on their service
delivery. This research focuses on the methodology of developing a FI, and thus only a limited sample size was used to
establish what people perceive as being fortunate. To our knowledge a similar methodology has not been developed for
South Africa. The FI proposes a new innovative way to determine if government provides the needs of a community.