Housing & services

Urban-rural distribution

Author/s: Katharine Hall
Date: August 2024

Definition

This indicator shows the number and share of children living in urban and rural areas. Information on the whereabouts of children helps to shed light on child mobility and urbanisation, and can inform spatial targeting.

Data

Data Source

Statistics South Africa (2003 - 2023) General Household Survey 2002 - 2022. Pretoria: Stats SA.
Analysis by Katharine Hall, Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town.

Notes

Children are defined as persons aged 0–17 years.
Population numbers have been rounded off to the nearest thousand.
Sample surveys are always subject to error, and the proportions simply reflect the mid-point of a possible range. In this instance it does not make sense to provide confidence intervals because the size of the urban and rural population is imposed on the data, rather than estimated by the survey. The data is weighted to accord with the mid-term estimates for that year. These are calculated through demographic modelling which is itself subject to error.

What do the numbers tell us?

Location is one of the seven elements of adequate housing identified by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.¹ Residential areas should ideally be situated close to work opportunities, clinics, police stations, schools and child-care facilities. In a country with a large rural population, this means that services and facilities need to be well distributed, even in areas that are not densely populated. In South Africa, service provision and resources in rural areas lag far behind urban areas.

In 2022, 57% of children lived in urban areas while 43% were in rural households – equivalent to 8.9 million children in the rural population. Looking back over a decade, there is a clear shift in the distribution of children towards urban areas: In 2002, 48% of children were in urban households, and the urban share increased gradually to 57% by 2017, after which it remained stable. Given population growth, the urban child population has grown by 3.2 million, from 8.7 million children in 2002 to 12 million in 2022. Children are consistently less urbanised than adults: In 2022, 68% of the adult population was urban, compared with 57% of children.

There are marked provincial differences in the rural and urban distribution of the child population. This is related to the distribution of cities in South Africa, and the legacy of apartheid’s spatial arrangements where women, children and older people in particular were relegated to the former homelands. The Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces alone are home to over 70% of all rural children in South Africa. KwaZulu-Natal has the largest child population in numeric terms, with 2.8 million (64%) of its child population being classified as rural. The least urbanised province is Limpopo, where only 16% of children live in urban areas. Proportionately more children (39%) live in the former homelands, compared with adults (28%). Almost all of children living in the former homeland areas are African.

Children living in Gauteng and the Western Cape are almost entirely urban based (97% and 95% respectively). These provinces historically have large urban populations. The urban child population in Gauteng alone has grown by over 1.6 million since 2002 and the urban child population in the Western Cape has grown by over 600,000. These increases are partly the result of urban births, and also partly the result of within-province movement and migration from other provinces. Other provinces that have experienced a marked growth in the urban share of the child population are the Eastern Cape, Free State and North West. KwaZulu-Natal, in contrast, has seen a slight reduction in its urban child population, both in percentage and numeric terms.

Rural areas, and particularly the former homelands, have much poorer populations. In 2022, six out of every ten children in the poorest income quintile lived in rural areas compared with one out of ten in the richest quintile, and this had been a consistent trend over the previous decade. Within the poorest part of the population, it is mainly rural households that care for children – even though many of these children may have parents who live and work in urban areas.
The inequalities also remain strongly racialised. Over 90% of White, Coloured and Indian children are urban, compared with 52% of African children.

1 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1991) The Right to Adequate Housing (art.11 (1)): 13/12/91. CESCR General Comment 4. Geneva: United Nations.

Technical notes

The area type variable is part of the stratified sample design, and the weights that are applied effectively impose on the data the urban–rural split that is estimated by a demographic model. Therefore the distribution of urban and rural households reflects the estimated size of urban and rural populations, and is not a statistical finding of the survey itself. Although the urban–non-urban variable was always used in the sampling procedure, it was not initially reported by Statistics South Africa between 2004 and 2010, due to controversy around the definition of area types. The geotype variable was subsequently included retrospectively in later releases of the GHS.

The distinction between urban and rural is described by Statistics South Africa as “rather fluid”, and some areas have been reclassified over the years. This is mostly because the ‘semi-urban’ category was dispensed with in the 2001 Census, resulting in a slightly more inclusive ‘urban’ classification which, for example, now includes informal settlements on the urban periphery.

Strengths and limitations of the data

The numbers are derived from the General Household Survey, a multi-purpose annual survey conducted by the national statistical agency, Statistics South Africa, to collect information on a range of topics from households in the country’s nine provinces.

The GHS uses a Master Sample frame which has been developed as a general-purpose household survey frame that can be used by all other Stats SA household-based surveys that have design requirements that are reasonably compatible with the GHS. The sample is drawn from Census enumeration areas using a stratified two-stage design with probability proportional to size sampling of PSUs in teh first stage, and sampling of dwelling units with systematic sampling in the second stage. The resulting sample consists of just over 20,000 households with around 70,000 individuals, and should be representative of all households in South Africa. It is also designed to be representative at provincial level and within provinces at metro/non-metro levels and three geography types (urban areas, rural areas under traditional authority, and farms).

The sample consists of households and does not cover other collective institutionalised living-quarters such as boarding schools, orphanages, students’ hostels, old-age homes, hospitals, prisons, military barracks and workers’ hostels. These exclusions probably do not have a noticeable impact on the findings in respect of children.

Changes in sample frame and stratification
Since 2014 the GHS has been based on the 2013 master sample that that is, in turn, based on information collected during the 2011 Population Census. The previous master sample for the GHS was used for the first time in 2008, and the one before that in 2004. These again differed from the master sample used in the first two years of the GHS: 2002 and 2003. Thus there have been four different sampling frames during history of the annual GHS, with the changes occurring in 2004, 2008 and 2013. In addition, there have been changes in the method of stratification over the years. These changes could compromise comparability across iterations of the survey to some extent, although it is common practice to use the GHS for longitudinal monitoring and many of the official trend analyses are drawn from this survey.

Weights
Person and household weights are provided by Stats SA and are applied in Children Count analyses to give population estimates on the indicators. The GHS weights are derived from Stats SA’s mid-year population estimates for the relevant year. The population estimates are based on a model that is revised from time to time when it is possible to calibrate the population model to Census data and larger population surveys such as the Community Survey.

In 2017, Stats SA revised its demographic model to produce a new series of mid-year population estimates and the GHS data were re-released with the revised population weights. All the Children Count indicators were re-analysed retrospectively, using the revised weights provided by Stats SA, based on the 2013 model. The estimates are therefore comparable over all years. The revised weights particularly affected estimates for the years 2002 – 2007.

The 2017 model drew on the 2011 census, along with vital registration, antenatal and other administrative data, but was a “smoothed” model that did not mimic the unusual shape of the age distribution found in the census. The results of the 2011 census were initially distrusted because it seemed to over-count children in the 0 – 4 age group and under-count children in the 4 – 14-year group. It is now thought that the fertility rates recorded in the 2011 population census may have been an accurate reflection of demopraphic trends, with an unexplained upswing in fertility around 2009 after which fertility rates declined again gradually. Similar patterns were found in the vital registration data as more births were reported retrospectively to the Department of Home Affairs, and in administrative data from schools, compiled by the Department of Basic Education. In effect, this means that there may be more children in South Africa than appear from the analyses presented in these analyses, where we have applied weights based on a model that it is now known to be inaccurate.

Stats SA has subsequently developed a new population model - the 2022 series, which provides revised mid-year population estimates back to 2002 and projected to 2032. However, the GHS series has not yet been reweighted.The population estimates in Children Count are therefore based on weights derived from outdated population model (2017). It is not yet clear when and how the population model will be revised again following the 2022 Census, as there are concerns around census under-count and plausibility of its findings.

Disaggregation
Statistics South Africa suggests caution when attempting to interpret data generated at low level disaggregation. The population estimates are benchmarked at the national level in terms of age, sex and population group while at provincial level, benchmarking is by population group only. This could mean that estimates derived from any further disaggregation of the provincial data below the population group may not be robust enough.

Reporting error
Error may be present due to the methodology used, i.e. the questionnaire is administered to only one respondent in the household who is expected to provide information about all other members of the household. Not all respondents will have accurate information about all children in the household. In instances where the respondent did not or could not provide an answer, this was recorded as “unspecified” (no response) or “don’t know” (the respondent stated that they didn’t know the answer).

For more information on the methods of the General Household Survey, see the metadata for the respective survey years, available on Nesstar or DataFirst .