DEMI-DC is a proposed way to answer a simple question for every one of Cape Town’s 116 wards: are the basic conditions for a dignified life actually in place here? This page explains the method. It is not a results page — no real ward has been scored yet.
Many wards in Cape Town lack a plain answer to a simple question: are the basic conditions for a dignified life in place here? DEMI-DC — the Dignity Enablement Measurement Index for Cape Town — is a proposed method for answering that question using public data, producing one score per ward across all 116 wards.
DEMI-DC is a measuring tool. It identifies strengths and weaknesses. It does not prescribe spending decisions. It asks whether the conditions for a dignified life are in place in each ward, not only whether a service has technically been delivered.
The index would measure nine everyday dignity conditions, each drawn from an existing public data source. Four of the nine — health, access to justice, trust and voice, and responsiveness — rely on approximations, and are described as such wherever they appear.
A ward’s score is not a simple average of its nine conditions. A strength in one area cannot cover for a failure in another. A ward that excels in education but struggles badly with safety has its overall score pulled down by the safety deficiency. This is deliberate: it reveals which condition is actually holding each ward back, rather than letting good numbers elsewhere disguise a serious gap.
Each ward would receive two figures: an overall score, and a “Dignity Floor” describing conditions for the poorest fifth of residents in that ward. This matters because a single ward can contain a wealthy suburb and an informal settlement within the same boundary. The gap between the two figures is what makes that internal inequality visible, instead of letting it average out of sight.
Comparisons would use the range actually seen across the 116 wards, not an arbitrary national benchmark. Every scale used to convert a raw measure into a score would be published in full, so the method can be checked and challenged by anyone.
Not every measure exists for every ward. Where one is missing, the method applies one consistent rule: a missing measure is filled with the median score of the other wards in the same sub-council area. Every ward would be labelled by how many of the nine measures were directly observed, rather than estimated.
| Measures directly observed | Label |
|---|---|
| 9 of 9 | Fully observed — standard uncertainty band |
| 8 of 9 | Near complete — band widened 15% |
| 7 of 9 | Partial — flagged, band widened 30%, excluded from rankings |
| 5 to 6 of 9 | Imputed — flagged, band widened 50% |
| Fewer than 5 | Suppressed — no overall score published |
Borrowed values pull toward the middle, which makes a ward with missing data look more similar to its neighbours than it might really be. Nothing is hidden by this: every imputed ward is flagged, and it carries a wider uncertainty band so readers know exactly how much confidence to place in it.
Once real scores exist, wards would be shaded using three bands.
Before relying on imputation, the method was stress-tested with a 2,000-iteration simulation, checking how much the citywide distribution of Green, Amber and Red wards would shift as more wards were imputed rather than directly observed.
| Scenario | Green | Amber | Red |
|---|---|---|---|
| All wards fully observed | 31% (27–34) | 15% (10–20) | 54% (52–57) |
| One in four wards imputed | 29% (24–33) | 18% (12–23) | 54% (51–56) |
| One in two wards imputed | 27% (22–32) | 20% (15–25) | 53% (50–56) |
Even with half the wards imputed, the overall citywide shape barely moves. This is a test of the method’s robustness, not a claim about any real ward’s colour.
DEMI-DC is not a budget formula that prescribes spending priorities. It is not a verdict on the worth of a ward or its residents. And it is not exact — it relies on approximations for four of its nine measures and on published imputation rules where data is missing.
The method makes falsifiable claims that real data can confirm or contradict, rather than vague assertions. Among them: that low-scoring wards would cluster in areas shaped by apartheid-era planning; that scores would decline with distance from the city centre along highway corridors; that safety would rank as the primary weakness in Cape Flats wards; and that the widest gaps between a ward’s overall score and its Dignity Floor would appear in mixed-income wards. If real data does not bear these out, the method has failed its own test.
Turning this method into real ward scores requires roughly fourteen weeks of work once data access is confirmed: formal PAIA and data-sharing requests to the City, SAPS and the Western Cape Department of Health, followed by mapping, scoring, ward reports, a public policy brief and release of the full underlying dataset. None of that work has started. This page describes the method the SDP proposes to use once it does.
“Missing data makes the picture blurrier. It does not make the picture more dramatic.”
See the DEMI-DC Ward Dashboard →