Cape Town CITY PROFILING REPORT 2025

The Cape Town City Profiling Report 2025, published by Good Governance Africa, provides a comprehensive analysis of the city's urban geography, governance, demographics, economy, and service delivery. It positions Cape Town as a lead city in the SADC region regarding governance and service delivery, while highlighting persistent structural inequalities and the legacy of apartheid spatial planning.

• Cape Town is identified as the most congested city in South Africa, a situation attributed to a combination of bowl-shaped topography and apartheid-era spatial planning. The city's downtown is constrained by a few narrow corridors (N1, N2, and M3), and laws like the Group Areas Act forced Black and Coloured residents into housing projects on the Cape Flats, 20–40 km from the city bowl, resulting in chronic congestion.
• The city demonstrates high institutional performance, ranking as the highest-ranked metro (4.5) in the 2024 Governance Performance Index (GPI) among eight South African metros. It has also achieved a clean audit outcome from the Auditor-General of South Africa for six consecutive years, making it the only metro to maintain this status since 2021.
• Despite high overall human development, Cape Town faces significant inequality. Its Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.76 in 2022 was the highest among the sampled SADC cities, but it recorded a Gini coefficient of 0.61 for 2022, indicating a highly unequal society.
• The city's economy is dominated by the tertiary sector, which accounts for 79.5% of employment. While the broad unemployment rate in 2021 was 30.2%—the lowest among South African metros—youth unemployment (aged 15–24) remained high at 45.2% in 2025.
• Water security is a critical challenge due to reliance on surface water and vulnerability to drought, as seen during the 2015/17 hydrological year. To increase resilience, the city aims for 25% of its water supply to come from diversified sources—including groundwater, water reuse, and desalination—by 2040.
• Access to basic services is high but uneven. In 2022, 97.7% of households had access to an adequate water supply and 97.7% had adequate sanitation. However, in informal settlements, residents often rely on communal standpipes and on-site sanitation systems, with 17% of children under five in these areas experiencing diarrhoea in 2017.
• The city's energy profile is characterized by a heavy dependence on Eskom for base load, though it uniquely operates the Steenbras Pumped-Storage Hydro Plant. The city is targeting a non-Eskom supply of ±650 MW by 2030 and is promoting rooftop solar PV and LED streetlighting to reduce coal reliance and emissions.
• Public transport is dominated by private cars (58% of trips) and minibus taxis (22%), while passenger rail has seen a rapid decline, losing 92% of passenger trips since the 2013/14 financial year due to mismanagement, theft, and vandalism.
• Cape Town has relatively clean air compared to regional and global peers, with an annual average PM 2.5 concentration of 8 µg/m³, which is below the WHO recommended limit of 15 µg/m³.
• The city's financial management is robust, with a budgeted operating expenditure of US$3,340 million for 2023/24. Trading services (electricity, water, sanitation, and waste) dominate expenditure at 57%. The city's capital expenditure budget for 2025/26 is projected to increase to US$817 million.

APA

Mongae, D. M. (2025). Cape Town CITY PROFILING REPORT 2025. Good Governance Africa. https://digitalmallblobstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wp-content/2025/12/Cape-Town-African-Cities-Report-2025.pdf

Chicago

Mongae, Dr Mmabatho. Cape Town CITY PROFILING REPORT 2025. Good Governance Africa, 2025. https://digitalmallblobstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wp-content/2025/12/Cape-Town-African-Cities-Report-2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Mongae |first1=Dr Mmabatho |title=Cape Town CITY PROFILING REPORT 2025 |publisher=Good Governance Africa |date=2025 |url=https://digitalmallblobstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wp-content/2025/12/Cape-Town-African-Cities-Report-2025.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{mongae2025cape, author = {Mongae, Dr Mmabatho}, title = {{Cape Town CITY PROFILING REPORT 2025}}, institution = {Good Governance Africa}, year = {2025}, url = {https://digitalmallblobstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wp-content/2025/12/Cape-Town-African-Cities-Report-2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }