Social Profile

SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROFILE

Witzenberg in 2001 had a population of approximately 83 567, with a fairly even distribution according to age and gender.

WITZENBERG POPULATION, SIZE, AGE AND GENDER (2001)
  WITZENBERG WESTERN CAPE PROVINCE
AGE CATEGORY Male Female Total Male Female Total
0-4 4 260 4 117 8 377    
204 553
200 989
405 542
5-14 8 291
8 168 16 459
415 365
415 793
831 158
15-34
15 563
15 725
31 288
829 823
865 884 1 695 707
35-64 11 930
12 101
24 031 646 561 711 273
1 357 834
Older than 65 1 478 1 935 3 413 96 018
138 074
234 092
TOTAL: 41 522
42 046 83 568
2 192 320
2 332 013

4 524 333

 

The table above shows that Witzenberg has a young age profile with about 30% of the population younger than 15 years.  The labour force represents about 66% of the population compared with just over 67% for the Western Cape as a whole.  This suggests that total labour migration out of Witzenberg is slightly higher than that from the province as a whole.  The implication of such as young age profile as manifests in Witzenberg is a proportionally smaller labour force, so that only 66% of the total population has to financially support the remaining 34%, yielding a dependency ration of in the order of two economically potentially productive persons for each unproductive person in the population.  Stated differently, even were the labour for in Witzenberg to be fully employed the dependency profile suggests a significant burden open workers to support non-workers.  In Witzenberg only a fraction of the labour force is actually employed and consequently the actual dependency ration realised is much worse.

It has been projected that the net population growth in the Western Cape to 2010 will be at a compound annual rate of 0,9%.  At this rate and all other things being equal this world suggest a growth of the Witzenberg population to in the order of 90 000 by 2010.