a census is not, in reality, a full and accurate count of the number of people in a country; rather, it is itself an estimate of the size of the population at a moment in time.. I have been involved in the process for the last four years as chair of South Africa's National Statistics Council. As outgoing chair, my last task was to. Gauteng is now clearly the most populous province in the country, with 15.1 million people, overtaking KwaZulu-Natal .
People in the Western Cape, the only province not run by the African National Congress, were particularly resistant to being enumerated or self-enumerating. This was true even after the provincial premier and Cape Town mayor made public calls for people to comply. The undercount in the Western Cape stands at 35.58% of people and 36.3% of households. In the Free State, by comparison, the undercount is 20.95% of people and 17.93% of households.
Becoming far more tech-savvy, and encouraging people to engage with Stats SA digitally, could be combined with other options to compile a national population dataset. It would also represent a significant cost-saving. This approach - harvesting data rather than gathering it directly - is being considered by many countries, but has not yet been attempted, and Stats SA needs to carefully consider this option.