The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) distributes grants to millions of people living in South Africa monthly. These grants enable beneficiaries to access basic goods and services.
Permanent grants distributed by Sassa include the Older Persons grant, grant-in-aid, Disability grant, Foster Care grant, and several Children's support grants. It is estimated that approximately 18 million people benefit from these permanent grants.
Sassa also provides a temporary grant to unemployed individuals living in South Africa, known as the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant. This grant reaches more than 7 million beneficiaries every month.
Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu was recently questioned in parliament about what challenges are preventing grant beneficiaries from accessing their money.
Challenges With Sassa Permanent Grants
Minister Zulu stated that no grant payment issues have been encountered since January 2023 apart from an incident of duplicate payments in May 2020 in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal region.
The minister explained the introduction of Covid-19-related benefits for grant beneficiaries in 2020. The staggered payment of these benefits resulted in duplicate files being extracted for payment for these two provinces.
The root cause of the error was determined to be from the implementation of multiple projects in a short space of time i.e., Top-up grants and staggering of payments.
Zulu assured members that any overpayments were fully recovered by the agency. The error was rectified, and beneficiaries received their grant payments later than they expected.
SRD Grant Payment Challenges
Minister Zulu revealed that some issues related to SRD grant payments occurred as Sassa struggled to source data when determining if applicants were eligible to receive the relief mechanism.
Sassa relies on other government departments and entities to verify information provided by grant applicants. This includes verifying information with the Department of Home Affairs, the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) and the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
Sassa has been experiencing challenges in sourcing data, as well as sourcing updated data, which has led to late payments, inclusion and exclusion errors as well as audit findings.
Several other issues delayed SRD grant payment from being paid to benefits. Some of these issues were due to beneficiaries not providing all the required information, beneficiaries being referred by the South African Fraud Prevention Service and challenges with the payment methods chosen by beneficiaries.
Zulu says clients who were unable to access some SRD grant payments were revisited after the normal payments were made.
Clients whose payment details were not available and have been verified at the time of the scheduled payment period, are revisited after the normal payments are processed.
The minister added that any outstanding SRD grant payments require the beneficiary to take action. Once the beneficiary completes these actions, the information will be verified and they will be paid their SRD grant.
