Mapping the South African Diaspora using Google Data Studio

In this blog post I just wanted to do something fairly simple and map out the South African diaspora using Google Data Studio.

So below is a data visualization showing the number of expat South Africans living in various countries.

The data showing the South African diaspora population

The data I’m using is from the Wikipedia page ‘South African Diaspora’.

t’s connecting using a formula in Google Sheets that pulls live data from the site to a Google Sheet, which is then displayed in Google Data Studio.

I wrote a previous blog post on the topic if you’re interested in learning how it works; Use Google Sheets to pull data from Wikipedia into Google Data Studio.

South African Diaspora. A map showing regions of the world with significant numbers of south african expats

Below is the data at the time of writing. It’s worth mentioning that the Wikipedia article states that this list only includes ‘Regions with significant populations’.

However some countries with a significant number of South Africans living in them are missing. For example there are many South Africans teaching English in South Korea, Japan, China and many South East Asian countries yet the totals from those countries are not included in the original data source.

The top five countries for expat South Africans are the usual suspects; UK, Australia, USA, New Zealand and Canada.

CountryExpat Population
United Kingdom203477
Australia178700
United States82054
New Zealand54279
Canada43406
Namibia21209
Netherlands20859
Germany14930
Swaziland11526
Portugal11477
Israel11290
Malawi8232
Greece7150
Switzerland6953
Qatar5000
Belgium3474
Ireland3208
Hong Kong3000
Sweden2941
Spain2660
Cyprus2509
Austria2339
Brazil1584
Zambia1539
Finland1497
France1367
Denmark1265
Norway1087

I hope you found this article interesting! Let me know what you think in the comments below.

My Other Blog Posts

You might enjoy some of my other blog posts. They are mainly focused on digital marketing and data visualization.