About SA Data Hub
SA Data Hub is an independent, open-source platform that makes South African government statistics easier to find, understand, and use. It is not affiliated with any government department.
Purpose
Government statistics in South Africa are published across PDFs, Excel files, and fragmented portals. SA Data Hub aggregates indicators from trusted primary sources — Stats SA, the Reserve Bank, SAPS, the Department of Basic Education, and others — and presents them with charts, plain-English context, and free CSV downloads.
The platform serves students, researchers, journalists, developers, policymakers, and the general public. There are no paywalls, no advertising, and no editorial adjustment of official figures.
Data sources
Every dataset traces back to an official publication. Primary sources include:
- Statistics South Africa — QLFS, CPI, GDP, Census 2022, population estimates, GHS
- South African Reserve Bank — interest rates, monetary statistics
- SAPS — annual crime statistics
- Department of Basic Education — matric results and enrolment
Update process
Data is refreshed when official releases are published — quarterly for labour and GDP, monthly for inflation, annually for crime and education. Each dataset page shows its last update date, freshness status, and update history.
Platform-level changes are tracked on the changelog. Dataset-level updates are logged on the updates tracker.
Maintainer
SA Data Hub is designed, built, and maintained independently by Ubayd Hattas, a BSc student at the University of Cape Town majoring in Computer Science, Statistics and Data Science.
Ubayd's work sits at the intersection of data engineering, artificial intelligence, and civic technology. He is interested in building software that turns raw government data into accessible, useful tools — particularly for audiences in South Africa and the Global South. SA Data Hub is one expression of that interest: an open-source platform that aggregates and contextualises official South African statistics so that students, journalists, researchers, and citizens can explore them without specialised training.
Beyond this platform, Ubayd built AfriGuard, a multilingual AI safety benchmark developed at the Global South AI Safety Hackathon. The project red-teamed frontier large language models across seven South African languages and found that safety guardrails degrade significantly outside English — evidence that AI safety research must extend beyond high-resource languages.
SA Data Hub is open source and maintained in Ubayd's spare time. Contributions, corrections, and feedback are welcome.