South Africa’s national standards for spatial information were gazetted at the end of June 2026 under the Spatial Data Infrastructure Act, the legislation that established the South African Spatial Data Infrastructure, or Sasdi. It is easy to file a new regulatory gazette under technical housekeeping. This one is different. We believe it could unlock billions of rand in economic growth over time, and it has already given organisations something to build on.
The country now has one agreed way to capture, maintain and share spatial data. Systems can agree on what to call a feature, hold its identity steady as streets are renamed and erven subdivided, and record how current and how accurate a dataset actually is. Name changes, accuracy and every other aspect of data quality can now properly inform decisions.
It is the same principle that once turned a shared screw thread and a common railway gauge into the infrastructure of entire economies: agree on a standard once, and everything built on top of it moves faster. Sasdi is South Africa’s version of that agreement, for the data behind some of its biggest decisions.
AfriGIS has prepared for this. We are ready to help organisations, municipalities and departments assess and implement the standards, because for more than 20 years we have seen what accurate data does for bottom lines.
Why this could be worth a percentage point of GDP
Getting this foundation right — a shared language for location, captured once and trusted everywhere — could in our view add as much as a percentage point to South Africa’s GDP over time. The gain builds gradually, not from one large transaction but from thousands of smaller ones: less duplicated survey effort, faster service delivery and a lower risk premium on loans and insurance policies priced against exactly where a property sits.
There is a service delivery dividend, too. National treasury regularly flags the credibility of municipal data as a priority, at a time when capital budgets still often go underspent. Aligning data to Sasdi is a direct route to graded roads reaching clinics sooner, faster grid connections for developing settlements and quicker rebuilds of flood-damaged infrastructure. Better data does not lay a single pipe, but it does decide whether the people laying the pipe know exactly where to dig, first time.
AfriGIS has maintained location data to standards of this kind since 2002, and we took part in shaping some of those now gazetted under Sasdi. That gives us the standing to say, with confidence, that compliance done properly turns a dot on a map into a fact you can build a budget on.
The standards have been gazetted. That is the first step towards implementation, not the last. Whether South Africa captures the percentage point on the table now rests with the data custodians, the municipalities and the businesses that choose to act.
The time is now
The work begins the moment an organisation chooses to read from the same map as everyone else. Our team of geospatial information scientists can assess where your data stands against the Sasdi standard, and what it would take to close the gap. Start with an assessment of what you already have.
To begin a spatial data standards assessment, contact the AfriGIS team via www.afrigis.co.za.
About AfriGIS
AfriGIS is a geospatial information science company in Southern Africa specialising in location-sensitive data and solutions. It provides customers with a suite of web-based tools and APIs to connect to, enhance and enrich their own data with location intelligence, insights and trusted data. Founded in 1997, it is a level 1 B-BBEE contributor with more than 100 employees across Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town in South Africa, Dublin in Ireland and Dhaka in Bangladesh.
- The author, Marna Roos, is senior client consultant and geospatial scientist at AfriGIS
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