South Africa’s population has risen by about 1.4 percent since 2019 to 59.6 million people, the country’s statistics agency announced on Thursday.
A report by Statistics South Africa showed that there are about 800,000 more South Africans since the last mid-year population report was published in 2019. At the last count the country had an estimated 58.8 million people.
The latest report revealed that 30.5 million of South Africans or 51.1 percent of the population are women and that the largest share of the population, with nearly 15.5 million people or 26 percent, live in the industrialised Gauteng Province.
The southeastern KwaZulu-Natal Province is the second most populated region, with an estimated 11.5 million people or 19.3 percent of the country’s population.
The sparsely populated Northern Cape Province continues to maintain the lowest population in the country – with its population of 1.29 million people, the agency said.
The Western Cape Province has seven million people, Eastern Cape (6.7 million), Limpopo (5.8 million), Mpumalanga (4.6 million), North West (4.1 million) and Free State with 2.9 million people.
According to the agency, some 28.6 percent of the population is aged under 15 years, while 5.4 million or 9.1 percent of the people are 60 years or older.
Life expectancy at birth for 2020 is estimated at 62.5 years for males and 68.5 years for females. The infant mortality rate for 2020 is 23.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, Stats SA said.
The overall HIV prevalence rate is about one percent among the population, with a total number of people living with HIV estimated at nearly 7.8 million in 2020, it added.
NM/jn/APA