South African Post Office Locations

The dataset contains the point locations of post offices in South Africa. The dataset is a third party entity published by the South African National Treasury (NT) through the NT's Vulekamali Data Portal (https://geo.vulekamali.gov.za/#category-2). Vulekamali is an easily accessible online data portal that was developed by NT in conjunction with Imali Yethu to promote budget transparency and public participation.

The physical location of the post offices are deemed as a service point and form part of the service point consortium that includes clinics, schools, South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) paypoints and police stations. The South African constitution mandates national, provincial and local governments to provide accessible services to the public through these service points. Post offices provide mailing services to the public and have in the recent past been contracted by the Department of Social Development (DSD) to facilitate the payments of the SASSA social relief of distress grants.

The data was originally accessed and downloaded as a spreadsheet on 01 November 2020 by SAEON. The spreadsheet was then modified into a tidy table, alphabetically arranging the post office locations by name in ascending order. This tidy dataset, containing the centroids (latitude and longitude coordinates) of the post offices, was then used to create a shapefile of the post office locations.