South Africa’s 26 public universities are all members of Universities South Africa. They are distributed across all nine provinces of South Africa. Each province has at least one university, with Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape provinces having acquired their own institutions in the past eight years (during 2014/2015).

Provinces which house the three main metropolitan centres, namely Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, are home to the largest number of universities.

See the map below for the geographic spread of universities in South Africa.