Sharthi Laldaparsad
Executive Manager of Policy Research & Analysis
Statistics South Africa
South Africa

Biography
Sharthi Laldaparsad is Executive Manager of Policy Research & Analysis at Statistics South Africa. Her research areas are statistical classifications, municipal spatial restructuring & capital investment spending patterns, and small-area estimation. Sharthi has been with Statistics South Africa for about 25 years, of which she was the head of Geography Division for about 20 years which included been the project manager for the establishment of SA Dwelling Frame. She was also a member of SA Committee for Spatial Information, responsible for the development of SA Spatial Data Infrastructure. Sharthi has three Masters degrees.

Abstract
Achieving the vision: Geo-statistical integration addressing South Africa's Developmental Agenda - Geo-statistical analysis

Co-author: Sulaiman Salau, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

South Africa’s urban and rural classifications still remain relevant. Policy interventions must address both urban and rural development and its future prosperity, so that the country can grow inclusively. Various definitions for urban and rural are used by different organisations based on their own purpose. Our approach makes use ofdata from various sources and spatial statistical methods to define and classify areas into urban and rural. Since the concept of urban and rural is inherently a spatial phenomenon, the results show that the spatial statistical methodologies are intuitive with respect to classifying these areas.