• Home ownership in the country has increased from 64 percent in 1994 to 78 percent 10 years later. This means that there are an estimated 7,9 million households, and since 1994, 500 houses a day have been built for the poor.

• The value of South African real estate has improved by more than 30 percent over the past five years. Pretoria, the capital city, has the second largest number of embassies in the world after Washington.

• Interest rates are at a 25-year low, while President Thabo Mbeki has been hailed by Time Magazine as the most powerful man in Africa.

• South Africa is also one of only 12 countries with national potable tap water. Almost a quarter of the country's non-interest budget is spent on education.

• The University of South Africa (Unisa) is the pioneer of correspondence tertiary education and is the largest correspondence university in the world with 250 000 students. In 1991, South Africa became the first country in the world to protect the great white shark.

• According to the Economic Freedom of the World 2005 annual report, SA ranks 38th out of 127 countries in terms of economic freedom, tied with France and ahead of Israel, India, Italy, China, Brazil and Russia.

• The country is ranked 28th in the world for ease of doing business, according to a survey conducted by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.

• The rand, the world's most actively traded emerging-market currency, has joined an elite club of 15 currencies where forex transactions are settled immediately, lowering the risk of transacting across time zones. It was also the best-performing currency against the US dollar between 2002 and 2005, according to the Bloomberg Currency Scoreboard.

• South Africa is also a premier hospitality destination, with Singita Private Game reserve in the Kruger National Park voted the best hotel in the world by the readers of the travel publication Condé Nast Traveller, and the number of tourists has increased by 116 percent since 1994.

• There are 37 000 high-net-worth individuals holding at least $1-million in financial assets in South Africa, according to the World Wealth Report. We are also the 28th most attractive destination for foreign direct investment.

• The country is also one of the 50 wealthiest in the world and is the best ranked in terms of price stability. It has been voted as the 32nd most democratic country in the world.

• Stellenbosch University was the first university in the world to design and launch a micro-satellite.

• South Africa is the first and, to date, only country to build nuclear weapons and then voluntarily dismantle its entire nuclear weapons programme. Tax revenue in SA has increased by 220% over the past 10 years.

• In 2005, more than 10-million South Africans benefited from access to social grants. In the global measure of women in parliament, South Africa ranks eighth.

• And of the 10 LSM levels (LSM1 - poorest; LSM 10 - wealthiest), the average South African family is located at LSM6.

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