Comment & Analysis
14th November 2025 | Spotlight
Spotlight has launched a new HIV dashboard and graph generator based on outputs from the Thembisa model. Our hope is that this dashboard will help the public and people working in healthcare to find important HIV numbers more easily.
There is much reason for pessimism when it comes to healthcare in South Africa. Most provincial health departments struggle to file clean books, long queues and shortages of healthcare workers are the order of the day at many clinics, corruption is a pervasive problem, and in at least one high profile case, someone has been assassinated for uncovering dodgy deals.
But there is also much to be proud of. Despite the broader healthcare and governance dysfunction, we have managed to implement a truly massive HIV treatment programme. We have many thousands of committed healthcare workers. We have many of the world’s best HIV and TB researchers. Where short-sighted politics and the deployment of underqualified cadres don’t get in the way, many people working in healthcare have excelled.
One of the underappreciated gems in our HIV response is the world-class work being done at the University of Cape Town to model our HIV epidemic, and increasingly also our TB epidemic.
Such mathematical modelling is critical since, apart from the available data not being perfect, it doesn’t, and can’t, tell the whole story. For example, government data on HIV testing can tell us who have tested positive for HIV, but it can’t tell us how many people are out there who are living with HIV, but who haven’t been tested. Rather than guess, a good mathematical model triangulates this type of thing based on the data that we do have and thus provides us with a more informed estimate.
At Spotlight, we mostly use estimates from the Thembisa model – the one developed at UCT – when we quote HIV figures in our reporting. The Thembisa model also forms the basis for UNAIDS’s HIV estimates for South Africa. You can read a detailed description of how the model works here. It is more complicated than this, but in short, the model pulls together data from a variety of sources and then uses sophisticated mathematics to come up with a comprehensive picture of what is happening with HIV in South Africa.
This week, Spotlight launched a new HIV dashboard and graph generator based on outputs from the Thembisa model. Our hope is that the dashboard will help the public and people working in healthcare to find important HIV numbers more easily. Please take a look and let us know what you think of it.
Though it is a Spotlight dashboard, we want to be very clear that the real work here was all done by the Thembisa team and the estimates are all theirs. Apart from producing this remarkable set of outputs, they have been exemplary in making their methods and estimates publicly available and enabling the development of this kind of dashboard by third parties.
As with our reporting on HIV and TB research more generally, all the credit should go to those doing the actual work – in this case Dr Leigh Johnson and his colleagues.
To go to the dashboard, you can click here.
