What is Ward IQ?

Ward IQ breaks down information to each and every municipal ward in South Africa. There are currently 4393 wards divided between South Africa’s 257 municipalities, which show a wide variation in their make-up even and sometimes especially in the same municipality.

An assessment of ward information is important to drill down beneath aggregated municipal information to understand better the socio-economic dynamics at play within municipalities. This is especially useful when considering the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty in South Africa’s municipalities and localities. Specifically, ward level comparisons help planners, policy makers and researchers identify geographic trends within municipalities and also pin point service delivery protest hotspots which could alert us to the dynamic issues around issues of poverty, poor service delivery, crime and so forth.

Ward IQ is also able to quantify and compare the performance of wards across South Africa on the Ward Poverty Index, which quantifies service deprivation along with income and unemployment levels, and shows how well each ward performs on this Index. The Ward Investment Index, by contrast, calculates relative prosperity across South Africa’s wards, based on income and employment data, as well as basic services, crime, and service delivery protests. The Ward Crime Index disaggregates and indexes SAPS crime data by ward. The Monitor of Party Representation by Ward reflects on the dominant political party within each and every ward. The Monitor of Race Breakdown by Ward shows the racial demographics of each ward. In addition, there are two interactive tools - the Ward Lookup and Ward Assessment tools which enable users to interact and manipulate different aspects of the Ward IQ data. There are also three profiles - a ward profile, a municipal profile, and a provincial profile for users to download and contextualise data.

Ward IQ is owned by Municipal IQ and was launched in 2017. Municipal IQ and Ward IQ are owned and run by Kevin Allan and Karen Heese. Kevin is a local government expert with more than twenty two years of experience in the field including work in national policy and legislation, as well as advisory research and consulting work with national and provincial departments and a number of municipalities. This included a stint as advisor to a previous national minister for provincial and local government. Karen is an economist who has worked in local government and development finance for more than twenty years.

Who should subscribe to Ward IQ?

Ward IQ will be useful to anyone wanting to compare ward data across a municipality, district, province or the whole of South Africa. It will also be particularly useful to anyone assessing the comparative performance of wards across these different categories.

Municipal IQ subscribers/users currently get free access to Ward IQ as part of their institutions’ subscription to Municipal IQ.

If you would like more information please contact Kevin Allan by e-mail at kevin@municipaliq.co.za