Current demographic data and information on housing, especially backyard dwellings are vitally important. These data layers would include the boundaries of townships, primary, secondary and tertiary datasets that will include point data, such as malls, retail outlets and government service points. This is the idea behind the Township Potential Atlas that will provide a wide range of comprehensive geospatial data. To be able to understand these trends and to develop appropriate interventions to bring about change in the lives of people living in townships as well as to develop appropriate policies, requires access to a single source of granular geospatial data layers. Add to this is the many townships (eg Khayelitsha) that are impacted by violent crime and others have high levels of property and social fabric crime. What this means is that funding that could have been made available to township communities to address the impact of the pandemic would not be available.

This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly all local municipalities did not receive a clean audit because of aspects such as corruption. The R350 grant allocated to people is highly likely to become a permanent feature to assist people overcome the long term impact of the pandemic. This increase in grants is larger than the four million grants issued between 20. As a consequence, there was a 4.4 million increase in social grants to 14 – 18 million recipients. Much of the job losses (515 000) were in community and social services and in the trade sector (373 000), all of which would have impacted on the economy of townships. During this period there was a 2.2 million decrease in employment countrywide. Between February and June 2020, labourers were 10 times more likely to have lost their jobs. The greatest impact has been the increase in unemployment and poverty. The impact of COVID-19 on people living in townships has been dramatic and has been described by some as an “perfect storm”. Gauteng with 8.9 mil people living in them has the largest township population followed by the Western Cape with 3.2 mil people.

In 2019, there were 21.7 mil people living in these townships.

South Africa has 532 African, Asian and Coloured townships that have a larger geographic area than both Johannesburg and Durban combined.

Townships od south africa