Suchergebnisse

Migration is critical for policy agendas and government planning as it changes thedemographic composition of towns, cities and regions – this requires adjustments toservice and infrastructure provision. To develop suitable policy responses, reliable,comparable and timely information is required. Obvious sources of migration data arethe national census and household and labour surveys. Socio-economic data havenot dealt well with migration. A recent CSIR research project, Spatial and TemporalEvidence for Planning in South Africa1 (StepSA), explored the use of voter registrationinformation as an alternative source of migration data. Anonymised voter registrationdata were provided by the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa forseveral consecutive elections covering a 12-year period. The data, once spatialised(and related to a single set of voting districts), could then be processed to extractmovement trends between different election periods. This article describes the processapplied and the initial analyses conducted.