South Africa publishes a great deal of data about itself, and most of it goes unread
Government departments, regulators, industry bodies and universities release thousands of figures about South Africa each month. Mzansi Data turns a selection of them into charts, explainers and tools for a general reader.
In a typical month Stats SA publishes inflation, retail sales, mining output and tourism arrivals. The Reserve Bank publishes interest rates and exchange rates. Eskom reports electricity demand by the hour, the Department of Water and Sanitation reports dam levels every Monday, naamsa reports new vehicle sales, and the IEC publishes election results down to each voting district.
Much of this is hard to use. Some of it appears only in long PDF reports, and some in spreadsheets whose column names make sense only to the people who compiled them. Most releases get a single news story on the day and are then overtaken by the next one, although many series go back decades and say more as a history than as a single release. This site is an attempt to make more of that material readable.
What we have found so far
Before publishing anything, we compiled a list of what is released, by whom, how often and in what form. The first pass found
Source: Mzansi Data, source catalogue of sources with a regular release, grouped by topic (released 30 October 2026).
The quality varies. Some sources publish clean, documented files on a fixed schedule, and a few have an API. About a third publish only PDFs, some require a request form or a login, and several long-running series have been paused or renamed in the past two years. Much of the work behind each post is getting the data into a usable state.
What we will publish
Posts will appear regularly and will be of four kinds.
Regular updates
Short posts on figures that affect most households, such as prices, employment, fuel, the rand and interest rates. Each has one or two charts and an explanation of what changed since the previous release.
Longer analyses
Pieces that follow one question through several datasets, for example who wins government tenders, where people are moving within the country, how load-shedding changed electricity use, or how a ward has voted over thirty years. These take longer to produce and appear less often.
Tools and trackers
Interactive pages for looking up your own area or circumstances: municipal finances, a personal inflation rate, or results as they are counted. The first is the local elections tracker, for the count after 4 November.
Notes on the data
Short notes on individual sources: what a dataset measures, where it falls short and how to obtain it. These are for readers who want to check our work or use the data themselves.
The topics will include the economy, politics and government, crime and justice, the environment and climate, markets and money, media, sport and culture. Anything South Africa measures regularly and publishes is a candidate.
How we work
Each chart has a source line giving the publisher, the dataset and the date of the release it uses. Where we have calculated a figure rather than copied it, the post says how.
Most of the data comes from official statistics and established research bodies. When a series has a known weakness, such as a change in method, a gap or a revision, we say so where it affects the reading.
We describe what the data shows and how reliable it is. Conclusions about policy are left to readers.
The code that fetches and processes the data is kept with the site, so any chart can be rebuilt from its original source.
Contact
We welcome suggestions for datasets or questions worth looking into, and corrections, through the contact page. Corrections are noted in the post they apply to.