The week that was in charts.
🤑 Over the line
Over half a million people said they were the victims of consumer fraud in the past year. This is according to Statistics South Africa’s 2024/25 Governance, public safety and justice survey.
Consumer fraud is defined as when someone provides services or goods and cheats on the quality or quantity. It includes advance-fee fraud such as R99 debit/credit card scams, 419 scams and questionable online shopping.
Of the people who experienced fraud, only a third of them reported the fraud to the police, with most saying they either reported it to other authorities (32%) or resolved it themselves (31%).
🎫 Buying tickets
Ticketing is one of the value-added services that has shown the highest growth in usage by South Africans between 2022 and 2024, providing a significant opportunity to both banks and retailers offering this value-added service (VAS).
Interestingly, recent consumer research has shown that only 18% of tickets were bought through banks, compared to an overwhelming 58% of purchases being made in-store at retailers.
This can be attributed to the finding that 40% of buyers live in townships, where access to retailers and merchants makes it more convenient to purchase this VAS in-store than at a bank or via digital channels.
Electrum Software conducted research into how South Africans purchase value-added services such as prepaid airtime and data, prepaid electricity, and betting vouchers in November last year. Fieldwork took place across all nine provinces, in both urban and peri-urban areas.
- Electrum is the next-generation payments software company, powering payments for banks and retailers.
😎 Sun shiny day
Africa’s solar surge is gaining momentum. The number of countries importing solar panels from China has climbed over the past year, according to a new Ember report, appropriately titled The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa.
The report found that 20 African countries set new records for solar panel imports in the 12 months to June 2025. Algeria stood out, importing 33 times more panels than the previous year, making it the second-largest African importer in the first seven months of 2025. The country is pushing to accelerate its renewable energy transition, with a target of 4GW of solar capacity by the end of 2025.
South Africa remains the continent’s largest importer, accounting for a third of solar panels shipped from China to Africa since 2021. Its imports peaked in 2023 during the height of the country’s energy crisis.
💧Water woes
I’ve been a long-time fan of the work of GroundUp so I’m excited that we’re starting a new partnership with the team to produce a series of charts to go with their great work.
Today’s chart looks at access to water, or the lack of access. You can read the full story at GroundUp.
AI coding tools like V0.app, Lovable.dev and Bolt.new are making it possible to turn an idea into a working model in just hours rather than days or weeks. At The Outlier we’re starting to experiment with tools like these to find new ways to share data stories.
This week we made a provincial unemployment dashboard. The data comes from Stats SA and we already had the data stored in our data repository DataDesk. So we had a good starting point. I uploaded the data to V0.app, an online AI code generator, and described the tool I wanted to make.
Note: These are experiments. Occasionally they may be a little bit rough around the edges but we do our best to make sure the information and data in them is correct.
AI tools used: V0.app
Data: Statistics South Africa via DataDesk
Time to build: ~1 hour
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