02 September 2020

AWARENESS OF POPULATION SIZE IS IMPORTANT

SAMNET URGES ALL MUSLIMS TO COMPLETE THE LATEST STATS SA CENSUS TRIAL 2021
BEFORE THE DUE DATE ON 6 SEPTEMBER 2020

The discussions and statistics around the number of Muslims who have contracted Covid and sadly
demised due to Covid, has once again focused the attention of the Muslim public on the total Muslim
population in SA. In the last Census, religion was not included as an indicator, despite strong lobbying for the inclusion of religion in population statistics by the South African Muslim Network to Stats SA.

It is important for us to know the population of Muslims in the country for the following reasons:
Allocation and distribution of resources for future planning

• For demographic purposes when building Mosques or applying for permits/consent to build
  certain religious places.
• For organizations involved in providing relief for Muslim communities
• For people to be able to plan ahead for the community/family
• To know the geographic distribution of Muslims
• For conservation purposes
• For business and marketing planning
• To monitor and identify communities in need
• To ensure sustainability by keeping populations stabilized
• To be able to keep track of immigrants and drastic changes in the country’s population
• Allocation of Hajj visa numbers are dependent on size of the Muslim community
• Proper statistics would assist each religious grouping to track their own religious groups and
  allocate resources etc. appropriately.

The South African Muslim Network is currently trying to collate information that we have at the moment so that we may work together with other organizations to formulate a more realistic picture of the total population of Muslims. It is also important, for example, in trying to get airtime on SABC platforms for religious programming dependent on the size of the population for future television, community TV and radio licenses.

According to the 2002 South African Yearbook, the Religious population percentage sizes were
recorded as follows:

The current population of South Africa is 59,389,738 as of Tuesday, August 11, 2020, based on
Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. Of this population, we can estimate roughly based on the statistic depicted in 2020 that the population size of Muslims is about 1.7 % and the estimated population size is about 1 009 626 Muslims in South Africa.

It is crucial that we all complete census studies so that we can have a more accurate picture of our
numbers and geographical spread.

STATS SA
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