WardByWard (The Gear Merchant) is operated by The Gear Civic Engagement Subscriptions (Pty) Ltd — a private company duly registered in the Republic of South Africa under the Companies Act 71 of 2008. We are a community crowdfunding platform with one mission: to fund a servant-leader candidate in every one of South Africa's 4,488 wards.
Candidates stand under the banner of The Great Ethical Reset — a civic movement that has applied for registration with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) as a political party and has met every IEC registration requirement. Through the movement, ordinary citizens put themselves forward to represent their own ward and to fix the ethics, service delivery and governance of their municipality from the ground up.
Our candidates commit to Servant Leadership & Greenleaf Ethics — fixing ethics, fixing service delivery, and improving lives for all residents in their ward. That is how the Great Ethical approach lifts service levels and governance across the country: starting with your own ward.
We ask every candidate to focus on their own ward — because nothing else matters. If you make your ward succeed, and somebody else makes their ward succeed, then ultimately we will have 4,488 succeeding wards — and consequently, a succeeding country.
WardByWard is engineered on a compliance-first architecture for civic engagement and political crowdfunding. Every feature — from the way campaigns are funded to the way every contribution is recorded — was designed around South African law before a single line of product logic was written. The result is a platform that protects its contributors, its candidates, and the integrity of the democratic process it exists to serve.
We build with modern tools, including cutting-edge AI — and we are transparent about it. What governs that technology is experienced human supervision, focused at every stage on ethics, data integrity and compliance with the law. Technology moves fast; our standards do not move at all.
Compliance is not a constraint on what we do — it is the foundation we build on. The Gear Civic Engagement Subscriptions (Pty) Ltd is committed to lawful, transparent and ethical conduct in everything it does. The sections below set out, in plain language, the South African law we navigate and how it protects you when you participate on WardByWard.
We are a private company duly registered in the Republic of South Africa under the Companies Act 71 of 2008. Our records, governance and financial controls are maintained to the standard the Act requires of a registered company — and to the standard our contributors deserve.
Your information is yours. We collect and process personal information lawfully, fairly and transparently, only for the purposes it was given, and always with your consent — consent is a condition of registration. You may access, correct, object to or delete your information at any time, and you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa. A dedicated Information Officer safeguards your data with reasonable technical and organisational measures.
We believe in openness. We maintain a PAIA manual and provide access to company records on request, in accordance with the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000, subject only to the lawful grounds for refusal the Act sets out.
The Great Ethical Reset has applied for registration as a political party with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and has met every IEC registration requirement. Our campaigns run in accordance with the Electoral Act 73 of 1998 and its regulations — covering candidate nomination, election conduct and the reporting the law requires — because lawful campaigning is the only kind of campaigning that earns trust.
Every contribution to campaign and candidate funds is made and recorded in accordance with the Political Party Funding Act 6 of 2018 and the IEC's party-funding regulations. Donations are disclosed whenever the law requires, and we accept no funding that would contravene the Act or its prohibitions.
Contributions on WardByWard are voluntary donations in support of civic engagement, candidate nomination campaigns and community funds. In law, they are support — not investments, not loans, not securities — and contributors receive no shares, interest, dividend or financial return. We structured the platform this way deliberately, so that giving stays simple, transparent and genuinely civic. Donation records are maintained for audit, tax and statutory reporting.
ZAG is a closed-loop platform credit offered purely in symbolic support of campaigns, candidates and community funds. By design, it exists only within WardByWard: ZAG cannot be transferred, sold, exchanged, converted or redeemed for cash, it carries no external market value, and it carries no expectation of financial return. This is not a limitation — it is the whole point. ZAG keeps civic support inside the civic space, where it belongs.
To protect the South African economy, ZAG is pegged 1:1 to the South African Rand (ZAG–ZAR). ZAG is not newly created money: it is a closed-loop representation of value that stays inside the platform, cannot circulate or be exchanged for cash, and therefore adds nothing to the national money supply. Our closed-loop stimulus cannot leak into the wider economy — by construction, not by accident.
A fixed supply of exactly 18,000,000,000,000 (18 trillion) ZAG was minted once, to serve up to 10 million registered users over a 5-year election cycle, with each eligible user or merchant accessing a merchant trading stimulus of R30,000 per month. Immediately after that single initial minting, the mint was destroyed — no further ZAG can ever be created, and the total supply is fixed forever.
Over the 5-year cycle, the platform uses ZAG as a barometer of electoral support — tracking genuine grassroots engagement with candidates and campaigns, ward by ward.
ZAG is available only to registered users of the platform who are also registered voters on the IEC voters' roll, and access is gated at multiple levels, including logged-in registered users, nominated candidates, The Great Ethical Reset affiliates, participants at Civic Movement Party level, and registered Ward Spaza Shop Fund merchants. ZAG is granted, held and applied only through the platform's own ledger, and only for platform purposes.
Because ZAG is a closed-loop symbolic credit, confined to the platform and its registered users, South African law classifies it as exactly that — not a "crypto asset", not a "fungible asset", not a security, not a financial product, not a deposit, not a means of storing value, and not a medium of exchange. That classification is deliberate and structural: we designed the platform to sit clearly and confidently within the Financial Sector Regulation Act 9 of 2017 (FSR Act) and the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 37 of 2002 (FAIS Act), so that ZAG does not engage the regulation of crypto assets, the rendering of financial advice, or the trading, storage or custody of securities or financial products. Nothing on this platform offers financial advice or solicits investment. Contributions made with ZAG are non-financial acts of symbolic support — exactly as intended.
Every contribution and financial movement on the platform is recorded on an immutable, hash-chained ledger. Each ledger entry carries a SHA-256 hash that references the hash of the entry before it, forming a tamper-evident chain from the very first transaction to the latest. Any attempt to alter, insert or delete a past entry would break the chain and be immediately detectable. The ledger is retained as a permanent audit record and is available for verification and reconciliation by our Information Officer, independent auditors, and regulators — including the IEC and the Information Regulator — as required by law.
Every financial movement on the platform is held to the standard of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001 (FICA) — including donor verification and the reporting of suspicious or unusual transactions — and we comply with the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 37 of 2002 wherever regulated financial activity applies.
Contributors and users are protected under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 — fair and honest marketing, full transparency about the nature of every contribution, and a complaint-handling process that resolves issues properly.
All platform transactions are governed by the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002. Your use of WardByWard is subject to the laws of the Republic of South Africa and the jurisdiction of its courts.
Questions about privacy, your personal information, a contribution, or any compliance matter? Contact our Information Officer at the address published on the platform. We respond within the timeframes POPIA and PAIA require.
WardByWard is built for the long game. Our technology stack is approximately 80% developed using cutting-edge AI tools, with the remaining 20% human supervision guiding every stage of the AI on ethics, data integrity and compliance with the legislation of the Republic of South Africa. We used AI where it excels — and we governed it with people where it matters most. The technology layer was developed under the legal underpinnings of the Companies Act through Conquest Design Engineering HQ, a CIPC-registered entity, as principal project consultancy and infrastructure contractor.