Understanding the root causes of crime in Africa is essential for devising effective strategies to combat it.
Some key factors contributing to the continent's crime challenges include poverty and inequality, lack of education, poor governance, and unemployment.
The number of crimes committed in a certain area during a given period of time, often per capita per year, is measured as the crime rate in that area. It is sometimes expressed as the number of criminal offences or events per 100,000 persons.
According to the city and its location, crime rates in cities might vary greatly. Crime rates, also known as crime indices, are frequently higher in cities in more densely populated regions than in rural or suburban areas.
The data platform Numbeo, claims that the Crime Index is an evaluation of the total degree of crime in a certain city or nation.
Numbeo's index is based on surveys from its website's visitors. Questions for these surveys are similar to many similar scientific and government surveys.
Each entry in the survey is saved as a number in the range [-2, +2], with -2 meaning strongly negative and +2 meaning strongly positive.
Numbeo filters survey to eliminate potential spam, like people entering a large amount of data which are different from the median value.
Crime levels lower than 20 are considered very low, crime levels between 20 and 40 are low, crime levels between 40 and 60 are moderate, crime levels between 60 and 80 are high, and finally, crime levels higher than 80 are very high.
In Numbeo’s global crime index list, 13 African cities were featured, and the first five cities are South African. Below are the 10 African cities with the highest levels of crime.
| Rank | City | Country | Crime Index | Global rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Pretoria | South Africa | 81.8 | 2nd |
| 2. | Durban | South Africa | 80.8 | 4th |
| 3. | Johannesburg | South Africa | 80.8 | 5th |
| 4. | Port Elizabeth | South Africa | 76.8 | 9th |
| 5. | Cape Town | South Africa | 73.6 | 16th |
| 6. | Lagos | Nigeria | 67.8 | 33rd |
| 7. | Windhoek | Namibia | 67.6 | 34th |
| 8. | Harare | Zimbabwe | 60.5 | 68th |
| 9. | Nairobi | Kenya | 59.2 | 78th |
| 10. | Casablanca | Morocco | 55.1 | 100th |
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