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.

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.
Country | Expat Population |
United Kingdom | 203477 |
Australia | 178700 |
United States | 82054 |
New Zealand | 54279 |
Canada | 43406 |
Namibia | 21209 |
Netherlands | 20859 |
Germany | 14930 |
Swaziland | 11526 |
Portugal | 11477 |
Israel | 11290 |
Malawi | 8232 |
Greece | 7150 |
Switzerland | 6953 |
Qatar | 5000 |
Belgium | 3474 |
Ireland | 3208 |
Hong Kong | 3000 |
Sweden | 2941 |
Spain | 2660 |
Cyprus | 2509 |
Austria | 2339 |
Brazil | 1584 |
Zambia | 1539 |
Finland | 1497 |
France | 1367 |
Denmark | 1265 |
Norway | 1087 |
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.