There has been a good deal of public discussion about the recently released 2011 population census and it is now possible to start to see some of the local level information. I downloaded the spreadsheet of age-sex information for all of the country’s municipalities from the website of Statistics South Africa. Then it was a relatively simple process to construct the age-sex pyramid for EC104: Makana Municipality – it is something that we do with our GOG102 Introduction to Global Development students though we have been using the data from 2001 census up to now.
Here’s the result.
Three things stand out:
- The low number of females in the 30-34 age group-presumably due to the differential impact of HIV-AIDs on women as opposed to men. This trend was reported in the BBC’s website earlier this year.
- The large numbers of 20-24 year olds, especially women, who are presumably students at Rhodes University. We know that women are in the majority in the student body.
- Lastly, and most interestingly, are the increasing number of children aged under nine. This seems to indicate that there is a reversal in the Total Fertility Rate which was thought to be declining in South Africa. You can see this in the 2001 age-sex pyramid for Grahamstown below which is tapered at the bottom.
To my mind the really interesting feature is the number of young children at the bottom of the pyramid – that is something requiring further examination.
If you are interested in Grahamstown there’s a nice selection of my Grahamstown pictures over at my online portal roddythefox.co.za.
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