SA’s Population Nears Sixty Million

Statistics South Africa recently released its mid-year population estimate, which shows that there was a 1 million increase over last year – the increase was from 57.73 million in mid-2018 to 58.78 million now. There were two worrying factors – first, nearly one third of the SA population are between 18 and 34, but only 13% of these are graduates, and 28.8% have some form of tertiary education. In Q1 of 2019 unemployment among the young stood at 39.5%, but if you include those in training and tertiary education the number of young outside employment reaches nearly 47%. Second, immigration into SA exceeded 1 million in the last 12 months (in other words the number of South Africans remained stable while the influx of immigrants explain the year-on-year increase).