On 11 April, The Midday Conversation on Ubuntu Radio featured an interesting discussion with Prof Justin Visagie, Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). Hosted by Vusi Maupa and Sabelo Makhubo, the episode explored how government can harness administrative data to improve service delivery.
“Administrative data simply means that data is being collected for a whole lot of other purposes, not necessarily research, and we can piggyback off that data source to make better decisions,” explained Prof Visagie.
He highlighted the need for a mindset shift in government: “We should have the mindset of leveraging data to understand what is going on and optimise the services that are being delivered. The world is changing, data is a resource, it’s an asset and we need to leverage it in creative ways.”
Prof Visagie shared a powerful example from the City of Cape Town, where authorities were grappling with a spike in copper theft during loadshedding. “Through their own model of what predicts and makes certain areas vulnerable, they had a range of different indicators—the price of copper, loadshedding schedule and the refinery where copper is sold—and used the tax data to locate where those businesses were,” he explained. This integration of data helped the city better understand and respond to the problem.
He also shared insights from a project he leads on administrative data mining: “We leverage tax records. SARS collects information on firms and employment across the country. We can access those records to extract valuable insights about what is happening in local economies.”
However, he noted that much of this valuable data still exists in silos: “At the moment we have administrative data sources but they sit in silos. Home Affairs holds birth and death data, education data… Where data is powerful is where you can link it between these different sources. What if we could link the tax data to educational enrolment? Then we could really know what degrees and skills are really in demand. For service delivery, integrating across the silos is really important for the future.”
For those interested in exploring what’s already available to the public, Prof Visagie pointed to spatialtaxdata.org.za – a platform offering online data and toolboxes that allow users to interact with and explore spatialised tax data.
Whether you’re a policymaker, researcher, or simply curious about the power of data, this episode is worth a listen.
You can find a link to podcast on Knowledge Hub or you can listen in on: SoundCloud or Spotify.