How I Built a South African Data Hub in My First Semester at UCT

During my first semester at UCT, most of my time was spent adjusting to university life. The workload was heavier than anything I had experienced before and balancing academics, health, social life and personal projects was a challenge.

One thing that helped me a lot during that transition was statistics.

I found myself constantly thinking about things in terms of outcomes, probabilities and trade offs. Which habits would benefit me the most over time? Which routines had the biggest impact on my academics and wellbeing? How could I spend my limited time in the most effective way possible?

As I started looking for data to answer some of these questions, I noticed something frustrating. Finding specific South African data was often much harder than it should have been.

This made me curious about how accessible data actually is in South Africa.

Naturally, the first place I looked was Stats SA. Statistics had always been something I was exposed to growing up, so it felt like the obvious place to start. It contains an incredible amount of valuable information, but I quickly realized that navigating it as an ordinary user could be difficult.

Many datasets were buried inside reports, spread across different publications or required a fair amount of searching before you could find what you needed. For someone who just wanted a quick answer or visualization, the process could feel overwhelming.

That got me thinking. What if there was a simpler way to explore South African data?

Not long after successfully launching my personal website, I realized I had developed enough web development skills to actually build something around this idea. I wanted to create a platform that made data easier to access, understand and explore.

On 31 May 2026, I launched SA Data Hub.

The goal was simple: make South African data easier to understand.

Over the following weeks, I spent a lot of time collecting datasets, cleaning them, converting CSV files into JSON files and integrating them into the website. It was a valuable learning experience, but it also taught me an important lesson about scalability.

The more data I added, the more I realized that manually managing files was becoming inefficient.

At the time of writing this, I am currently on my winter break. Alongside attending my first hackathon, the Global South AI Safety Hackathon in Cape Town and participating in various events, I have been learning PostgreSQL and exploring better ways to manage data through databases rather than static files.

My goal is to make SA Data Hub far more automated. I want data collection, storage and updates to rely less on manual work and more on databases, APIs, and Python scripts. Ideally, by the time second semester begins, most of the maintenance will be handled behind the scenes.

For now, I am not rushing into new projects.

I want to continue improving SA Data Hub because I believe some projects become more valuable the longer you stick with them. Every new dataset, feature and improvement adds to what already exists. The project compounds over time.

Looking back, it is still strange to think that this all started because I was trying to understand my own routines better during my first semester at university.

What began as curiosity about data eventually turned into a platform built to help others explore it too.