South Africa Subnational Administrative Boundaries, Levels 0-4

27 December 2018 boundaries for South Africa, structured into four administrative levels: 9 provinces, 52 districts, 213 local municipalities, and 4,392 sub-units. The dataset was contributed by OCHA ROSEA, quality assured by OCHA FIS and HDX, and reviewed for accuracy on 28 January 2025. It is part of the Global Subnational Administrative Boundaries collection and is available in multiple geospatial formats.

Use Cases

• Map administrative subdivisions for regional planning based on the four-level hierarchy.
• Conduct spatial joins for demographic or resource data based on the provided boundaries.
• Analyze subnational governance structures based on the province, district, and municipality divisions.
• Create base maps for humanitarian or development operations in South Africa based on the validated boundaries.

Strengths

• Contains 9 provinces, 52 districts, 213 local municipalities, and 4,392 sub-units, providing detailed coverage.
• Quality assured and published by authoritative organizations OCHA FIS and HDX.
• Available in multiple formats (GEOJSON, SHP, XLSX, GEODATABASE) for flexibility.
• Explicitly reviewed for accuracy and completeness on 28 January 2025.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The underlying boundaries were created on 27 December 2018; changes after this date are not reflected.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.

Provenance

Source

OCHA Regional Office for Southern and Eastern Africa (ROSEA)

Collection Method

Boundaries created by the source, configured and published by OCHA FIS and HDX.

Time Range

Boundaries valid as of 27 December 2018.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-10 09:06:46.334648; freshness should be verified.

Geography

South Africa