South African Education District Boundaries

This dataset demarcates the boundaries of the education districts across South Africa. Education districts differ greatly in terms of their geographical size, number of schools served and the poverty profile of communities they encompass. There are 86 districts at present, most of which are based on district municipalities or sub-divisions thereof.

The Free State and the Northern Cape have used district municipalities as the basis for education district demarcation, so they are purposely limited by the number of district municipalities defined in their respective provinces. Therefore, these two provinces have perfect alignment between education districts and district municipality boundaries. Likewise, the North West has named their education districts after district municipalities but adopted slightly different boundaries to them, creating an overlap between the education districts and district municipalities. The remaining provinces have split some of there district municipalities to create unique education districts. Mpumalanga has split one of its three district municipalities into two education districts (creating four eductaion disstricts for the province) while Limpopo split each of its five district municipalities into two education districts to reach a total of 10 education districts. Provinces with large metropolitan areas such as Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal have tended to split their metropolitan areas into two or more districts. The Eastern Cape province diverted from the norm and adopted local municipalities as the basis for demarcation of education districts, making it the province with the most education districts as local municipality boundaries are far more numerous than district municipalities. The education districts of the Eastern Cape perfectly align with the local municipality boundaries of the province.

This data was originally sourced from the Department of Basic Education (DBE) https://www.education.gov.za/Programmes/EMIS/EGISInteractiveData.aspx accessed on 10 July 2020.