Annual Reports

GCRO 2024/25 Annual Report

During the April 2024–March 2025 financial year, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) advanced its record of rigorous, policy-relevant research while concluding its 2020–2025 strategic cycle.

The organisation developed a new Five-Year Strategic Plan (2025–2030) built on four goals: strengthening the GCR knowledge base, deepening partnerships across the academic – policy interface, enhancing communication and dissemination, and ensuring organisational resilience.

The year was marked by strong support to the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) as it entered a new term of office. The GCRO played a key role in the Five-Year Review (2019–2024) and contributed to the Medium-Term Development Plan (2024–2029). It also commissioned MISTRA to produce the Gauteng City-Region Scenarios 2035 to inform long-term planning.

A major highlight was the release of Quality of Life Survey 7 (2023/24), offering insights into life satisfaction, service delivery pressures, household finances and safety. The GCRO also produced a wide range of publications, including a Provocation on local government interventions, a research report on peripheral and displaced urbanism, two Occasional Papers, fourteen QoL 7 Data Briefs, one Rapid Research Paper, ten Maps of the Month and various journal articles, book chapters and conference presentations.

GCRO 2023/24 Annual Report

During the April 2023–March 2024 financial year, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory celebrated its 15th anniversary. This milestone was celebrated at an event on 16 November 2023 at the GCRO's office in Braamfontein, where a catalogue of GCRO's past publications was launched.

One of the GCRO’s major undertakings of the 2023/24 financial year was the fieldwork for the 7th Quality of Life survey. Together with a fieldwork team, the GCRO conducted more than 13 700 interviews across Gauteng over a half-year period. The results of this survey, which provide key insights into the state of the province, will be launched in the 2024/25 financial year.

GCRO 2022/23 Annual Report

This Annual Report covers the April 2022-March 2023 financial year, which is at the mid-point of the 2020/21 to 2024/25 five year strategy. Having spent much of 2020 and 2021 working remotely, GCRO staff returned to the office in the 2022/23 financial year. Office life has been enlivened by a series of staff appointments that bring essential capacity to key areas of work, not least to the Quality of Life Survey and the ‘Inclusive economies’ research programme. The freedoms brought by the easing of lockdowns facilitated the GCRO’s work of providing an interface between the worlds of research and government. Notably, the GCRO partnered with the Gauteng Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) and Urban Planning to organise a symposium at the University of Johannesburg on spatial transformation in August 2022. In addition to hosting events of this nature, the GCRO published a number of outputs, including a provocation on displaced urbanism, a research report on urban imaginaries, an occasional paper on using tax data for economic analysis, nine articles in the map of the month series, one vignette, and various journal articles and book chapters.

GCRO 2021/22 Annual Report

2021/22 marked the second year in the GCRO's 2020/21 to 2024/25 five year strategy. The year continued to see COVID-19 related disruptions to normal operations, with most staff continuing to work at home for extended periods. However, it also saw many exciting developments and achievements. Rashid Seedat took over from Dr. Rob Moore as Executive Director in June 2021, entering at a point of high energy as GCRO prepared for the launch of the sixth iteration of the Quality of Life Survey. QoL 6 (2020/21) results were released to a large online audience in September 2021. The event was followed by significant media interest, five OpEds published by GCRO staff, and multiple presentations of the findings to government. Another highlight of the year was three well-attended webinars, co-hosted with the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), responding to the impacts and implications of the July 2021 violence.

GCRO 2020/21 Annual Report

This Annual Report covers the April 2020-March 2021 financial year. This period saw three important events in the life of the organisation. First it marked the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically transformed not only the way GCRO did work, but also the focus of the Observatory's work over the year. For almost the whole of 2020/21 nearly every staff member was engaged either in direct support to government in responding to the COVID-19 crisis, or in producing outputs that helped to deepen public understanding of the pandemic's impact. Second, the year saw the completion of most of the fieldwork for the sixth iteration of the Quality of Life Survey. Third, this was the last year in the five-year tenure of Dr Rob Moore as Executive Director of the GCRO.